“Yes,” he said. “I did. But I wanted to write and I realized I couldn’t do that while I stayed a lobe sod. So I talked about quitting.” He watched. She came up to the bait. Soon he would grab her; confession not such a bad thing, making her lower her guard. The voice of the other continued.
“That worried her,” Nadine suggested.
“Yes. That worried her. She didn’t like poetry. Writing. She was strictly vid. It got worse.”
“Yes.”
“Much worse. Gina was in between. I felt like I was coming apart. Finally I had to leave.”
“Yes.”
“We waited a year. I tried to write. Dione worked two jobs. Neither of us was therapied but that didn’t matter so much back then. I never sent anything out to be published. I went to work for another company. Copyediting newspaper text. Dione said she wanted me back. I said I wanted her. But we couldn’t bring ourselves together. Something else. Every time.”
“Yes.”
“The divorce was almost final. Gina was taking it bad. Dione wanted to take her in for therapy. I said no. I said let her be herself, let her work it out. Dione said Gina was she was seven Dione said Gina was talking about death a lot. I said yes but she’s too young to know anything about it, it’s curiosity, let it be. She’ll grow.”
“Yes.”
He could just reach out and take one arm, turn her around. + How do you go about it with your bare hands. Without tools.
+ It would be a good idea to cry now.
“I’m listening,” Nadine said.
“The divorce. Two weeks and it would be through the courts. Informal proceedings, no court appearance, all assets divided already.”
“That’s the way I’ve done it,” Nadine said.
“She was bringing Gina to me for a weekend. We did that. We didn’t want to hurt her.”
Nadine said nothing to encourage him. Even in her insensitivity she could sense something disagreeable coming.
“There was a slaveway tangle. A bus. Their bus. Small quake in the valley had severed slaveway grids. They went into a retaining wall and seven cars slammed into them. Gina died. Dione too, a day later.”
Nadine’s eyes grew wider. She looked feverish. “My God,” she said breathlessly.
+ She’s specking it prime. She likes digging her fingers in, kneading the humus.
“I took it alone. I didn’t get therapy. I walked around like a zombie. I thought I really loved Dione. I didn’t expect anything so final. Gina came to talk with me before bed. I was really flying. I stayed away from therapy because I felt it would dishonor them, Gina and Dione. I made a little shrine for them and burned incense. I wrote poetry and burned it.
“After a few months, I went back to work for a while. I had met Goldsmith before. I started to come up. Out of that swamp. He helped me. He told me about seeing his father, his dead father, when he was a child. He told me I wasn’t going crazy.”
Nadine shook her head slowly. “Richard, Richard,” she said, obligatory sympathy.
His head was crowded. There was his present self and something like Goldsmith and this old Richard Fettle and all of his memories in train. The crowding made him want to lie down in a dark room.
“We should go for a walk,” Nadine said decisively. “After something like this you need to go out and do something vigorous, get some exercise.”
She reached out for him. He gave her his hand and stood up, joints popping loudly.
“You never told anybody,” she said as they descended the third floor stairs.
“No,” he agreed. “Only Goldsmith.” He lingered a step behind and watched the back of her neck.
47
Karl prepared the inducers in the probe room. David and Carol worked with dedicated arbeiters to check and recheck all connections and remotes before bringing Goldsmith in. Martin watched the preparations closely, standing out of the way, saying nothing but making his presence felt.
“You’re hovering,” Carol told him, rolling an equipment table past the control console.
“My prerogative,” he said, smiling quickly.
“You haven’t eaten.” She stowed the table, stuffed hands in pockets and sauntered up beside him with a mocking air of chastisement. “You’ve been working too hard. You’re pale. You’ll need your strength for the probe.”
He regarded her seriously. “I need to talk with you.” He swallowed and glanced away. “Before we go in.”
“I presume you mean over something to eat.”
“Yes. I think everything’s ready here. Except Albigoni. Lascal was supposed to bring him in…”
“We can go ahead without him.”
“I want him here as a guarantee. If his enthusiasm’s flagging…”
Karl passed by and Martin stopped. This part of the probe did not concern the others.
“Lunch,” Carol suggested. “Late lunch on the beach. It’s moderately cool. Put on a sweater.”
Martin looked up and saw Lascal enter the gallery of twenty seats overlooking the amphitheater. Albigoni came in behind him. Martin nodded a greeting to them and turned back to Carol. “Good idea. After Goldsmith’s down and we’ve injected the nano.”
Part superstition, part supposition, Martin had always demanded that triplex probe subjects not see or be able to recognize their investigators. He thought it best for a feedback prober to enter the Country fresh and unknown. To that end David and Karl—who might have to join the probe team if there was difficulty—gathered with Martin and Carol behind a curtain at the rear of the amphitheater as the subject was wheeled in on a gurney.
Goldsmith wore a hospital gown. His right arm and neck were already equipped with intravenous tubes. He lay silent on the gurney, alert and observant. Seeing Albigoni in the gallery, Goldsmith lifted his left hand in brief greeting, dropped it and turned away.
Albigoni stared wide eyed into the amphitheater. Lascal held his arm gently. They sat and Albigoni squinted, rubbing the bridge of his nose with both hands.
Margery and Erwin applied the field pads to Goldsmith’s temple.
Martin heard him say, “Good luck. If something happens and I don’t come back…Thank you. I know you all did your best.”
“There’s no danger,” Erwin said.
“Anyway,” Goldsmith said ambiguously.
Margery applied the inducer field. Goldsmith drowsed off in a matter of minutes. With his eyes closed, his lips worked briefly—that curious reflexive prayer seen in every sleep induced patient Martin had ever treated—and his features relaxed. The wrinkles on his face smoothed. He might have been ten years younger. Margery and Erwin lifted him into the triplex couch and applied arm, thigh, head and thorax restraints. Martin asked for the time. The theater manager’s feminine voice called out, “Thirteen zero five thirty-three.”
“All signs normal,” Margery said. “He’s yours, Dr. Burke.”
“Let’s begin MRI full cranial,” Martin said, emerging from behind the curtain. “Give me four likely loci.”
David and Karl lifted a hollow tube filled with super-conducting magnets and slipped it into grooves on each side of Goldsmith’s head. David conducted a quick check of Goldsmith’s connections before attaching the cable.
Then, equipment humming faintly, David made a series of rough scans of Goldsmith’s brain and upper spinal cord. “Wall screen,” Martin asked. The amphitheater manager brought down a display over the couch and Martin talked his way through the series of MRI scans. Red circles in the hypothalamus indicated computer guesses at likely probe positions based upon past experience. Coordinates for seven of those positions were fed into the prep container for the nanomachines, which would take their bearings from the points of the inducer field nodes; each tiny nanomachine would know where it was to within a few angstroms.