"She's sick," the foodman said.
Startled, Asher said, "She looked all right the last time I talked to her. We used video. She did say something about having trouble reading her terminal's displays."
"She's dying," the foodman said, and sipped his Kaff.
The word scared Asher. He felt a chill. In his mind he tried to picture the woman, but strange scenes assailed him, mixed with soupy music. Strange concoction, he thought; video and aud fragments, like old cloth remnants of the dead. Small and dark, the woman was. And what was her name? "I can't think," he said, and put the palms of his hands against the sides of his face. As if to reassure himself. Then, rising and going to his main board, he punched a couple of keys; it showed her name on its display, retrieved by the code they used. Rybys Rommey. "Dying of what?" he said. "What the hell do you mean?"
"Multiple sclerosis."
"You can't die of that. Not these days."
"Out here you can."
"How-shit." He reseated himself; his hands shook. I'll be god damned, he thought. "How far advanced is it?"
"Not far at all," the foodman said. "What's the matter?" He eyed Asher acutely.
"I don't know. Nerves. From the Kaff."
"A couple of months ago she told me that when she was in her late teens she suffered an-what is it called? Aneurysm. In her left eye, which wiped out her central vision in that eye. They suspected at the time that it might be the onset of multiple sclerosis. And then today when I talked to her she said she's been experiencing optic neuritis, which-"
Asher said, "Both symptoms were fed to M.E.D.?"
"A correlation of an aneurysm and then a period of remission and then double vision, blurring . . . You're all rattled up."
"I had the strangest, most weird sensation for just a second, there," Asher said. "It's gone now. As if this had all happened once before."
The foodman said, "You ought to call her up and talk to her. It'd be good for you as well. Get you out of your bunk."
"Don't mastermind my life," Asher said. "That's why I moved out here from the Sol System. Did I ever tell you what my second wife used to get me to do every morning? I had to fix her breakfast, in bed; I had to-"
"When I was delivering to her she was crying."
Turning to his keyboard, Asher punched out and punched out and then read the display. "There's a thirty to forty percent cure rate for multiple sclerosis."
Patiently, the foodman said, "Not out here. M.E.D. can't get to her out here. I told her to demand a transfer back home. That's what I'd sure as hell do. She won't do it."
"She's crazy," Asher said.
"You're right. She's rattled up crazy. Everybody out here is crazy."
"I just got told that once today already."
"You want proof of it? She's proof of it. Wouldn't you go back home if you knew you were very sick?"
"We're never supposed to surrender our domes. Anyhow it's against the law to emigrate back. No, it's not," he corrected himself. "Not if you're sick. But our job here-"
"Oh yeah; that's right-what you monitor here is so important. Like Linda Fox. Who told you that once today?"
"A Clem," Asher said. "A Clem walked in here and told me I'm crazy. And now you climb down my ladder and tell me the same thing. I'm being diagnosed by Clems and foodmen. Do you hear that sappy string music or don't you? It's all over my dome: I can't locate the source and I'm sick of it. Okay, I'm sick and I'm crazy; how could I benefit Ms. Rommey? You said it your- self. I'm in here totally rattled up; I'm no good to anyone.
The foodman set down his cup. "I have to go.
"Fine," Asher said. "I'm sorry; you upset me by telling me about Ms. Rommey."
"Call her and talk to her. She needs someone to talk to and you're the closest dome. I'm surprised she didn't tell you."
Herb Asher thought, I didn't ask.
"It is the law, you know," the foodman said.
"What law?"
"If a domer is in distress the nearest neighbor-"
"Oh." He nodded. "Well, it's never come up before in my case. I mean-yeah, it is the law. I forgot. Did she tell you to remind me of the law?"
"No," the foodman said.
After the foodman had departed, Herb Asher got the code for Rybys Rommey's dome, started to run it into his transmitter and then hesitated. His wall clock showed 18:30 hours. At this point in his forty-two-hour cycle he was supposed to accept a sequence of high-speed entertainment, audio- and video-taped signals emanating from a slave satellite at CY3O III; upon storing them he was to run them back at normal and select the material suitable for the overall dome system on his own planet.
He took a look at the log. Fox was doing a concert that ran two hours. Linda Fox, he thought. You and your synthesis of old-time rock, modern-day streng and the lute music of John Dowland. Jesus, he thought; if I don't transcribe the relay of your
live concert every domer on the planet will come storming in here and kill me. Outside of emergencies-which really didn't occur-this is what I'm paid to handle: information traffic between planets, information that connects us with home and keeps us human. The tape drums have to turn.
He started the tape transport at its high-speed mode, set the module's controls for receive, locked it in at the satellite's operating frequency, checked the wave form on the visual scope to be sure that the carrier was coming in undistorted and then patched into an audio transduction of what he was getting.
The voice of Linda Fox emerged from the strip of drivers mounted above him. As the scope showed, there was no distortion. No noise. No clipping. All channels, in fact, were balanced; his meters indicated that.
Sometimes I could cry myself when I hear her, he thought. Speaking of crying.
Wandering all across this land,
My band.
In the worlds that pass above,
I love.
Play for me you spirits who are weightless.
I believe in drinking to your greatness.
My band.
And, behind Linda Fox's vocal, the vibrolutes which were her trademark. Until Fox no one had ever thought of bringing back that sixteenth-century instrument for which Dowland had written so beautifully and so effectively.
Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace?
Shall I pray? shall I prove?
Shall I strive to a heavenly joy
With an earthly love?
Are there worlds? Are there moons
Where the lost shall endure?
Shall I find for a heart that is pure?
These remasterings of the old lute songs, he said to himself; they bind us. Some new thing, for scattered people as flung as if they had been dropped in haste: here and there, disarranged, in domes, on the backs of miserable worlds and in satellites and arks-victimized by the power of oppressive migration, and with no end in sight.
Now the Fox was singing one of his favorites:
Silly wretch, let me rail
At a voyage that is blind.
Holy hopes do require
A flurry of static. Herb Asher grimaced and cursed; the next line had been effaced. Damn, he thought.
Again the Fox repeated the lines.
Silly wretch, let me rail
At a voyage that is blind.
Holy hopes do require
Again the static. He knew the missing line. It went:
Greater find.
Angrily, he signaled the source to replay the last ten seconds of its transmission; obligingly, it rewound, paused, gave him the signal back, and repeated the quatrain. This time he could make out the final line, despite the eerie static.
Silly wretch, let me rail
At a voyage that is blind.
Holy hopes do require
Your behind.
"Christ!" Asher said, and shut his tape transport down. Could he have heard that? "Your behind"?
It was Yah. Screwing up his reception. This was not the first time.
The local throng of Clems had explained it to him when the int
erference had first set in several months ago. In the old days before humans had migrated to the CY3O-CY3OB star system, the autochthonic population had worshiped a mountain deity named Yah, whose abode, the autochthons had explained, was the little mountain on which Herb Asher's dome had been erected.
His incoming microwave and psychotronic signals had gotten cooked by Yah every now and then, much to his displeasure. And when no signals were coming in, Yah lit up his screens with faint but obviously sentient driblets of information. Herb Asher had spent a long time fussing with his equipment, trying to screen out this interference, but with no success. He had studied his manuals and erected shields, but to no avail.
This, however, was the first time that Yah had wrecked a Linda Fox tune. Which, as far as Asher was concerned, put the matter over a crucial line.
The fact of the matter was, whether it was healthy or not, he was totally dependent on the Fox.
He had long maintained an active fantasy life dealing with the Fox. He and Linda Fox lived on Earth, in California, at one of the beach towns in the Southland (unspecified beyond that). Herb Asher surfed and the Fox thought he was wonderful. It was like a living commercial for beer. They had campouts on the beach with their friends; the girls walked around nude from the waist up; the portable radio was always tuned to a twenty-four-hour no-commercials-at-all rock station.
However, the truly spiritual was what mattered most; the topless girls at the beach were simply-well, not vital but pleasant. The total package was highly spiritual. It was amazing how spiritual an elaborated beer commercial could get.
And, at the peak of it all, the Dowland songs. The beauty of the universe lay not in the stars figured into it but in the music generated by human minds, human voices, human hands. Vibrolutes mixed on an intricate board by experts, and the voice of Fox. He thought, I know what I must have to keep on going. My job is my delight: I transcribe this and I broadcast it and they pay me. "This is the Fox," Linda Fox said.
Herb Asher switched the video to holo, and a cube formed in which Linda Fox smiled at him. Meanwhile, the drums spun at furious speed, getting hour upon hour into his permanent possession.
"You are with the Fox," she declared, "and the Fox is with you." She pinned him with her gaze, the hard, bright eyes. The diamond face, feral and wise, feral and true; this is the Fox / Speaking to you. He smiled back.
"Hi, Fox," he said.
"Your behind," the Fox said.
--------------
Well, that explained the soupy string music, the endless Fiddler on the Roof. Yah was responsible. Herb Asher's dome had been infiltrated by the ancient local deity who obviously begrudged the human settlers the electronic activity that they had brought. I got bugs all in my meal, Herb Asher thought, and I got deities all in my reception. I ought to move off this mountain. What a rinky-dink mountain it is anyhow-no more, really, than a slight hill. Let Yah have it back. The autochthons can start serving up roasted goat meat to the deity once more. Except that all the autochthonic goats had died out, and, along with them, the ritual.
Anyhow his incoming transmission was ruined. He did not have to replay it to know. Yah had cooked the signal before it reached the recording heads; this was not the first time, and the contamination always got onto the tape.
Thus I might as well say fuck it, he said to himself. And ring up the sick girl in the next dome.
He dialed her code, feeling no enthusiasm.
It took Rybys Rommey an amazingly long time to respond to his signal, and as he sat noting the signal-register on his own board he thought, Is she finished? Or did they come and forcibly evacuate her?
His microscreen showed vague colors. Visual static, nothing more. And then there she was.
"Did I wake you up?" he said. She seemed so slowed down, so torpid. Perhaps, he thought, she's sedated.
"No. I was shooting myself in the ass."
"What?" he said, startled. Was Yah screwing him over once again, cooking his signal? But she had said it, all right.
Rybys said, "Chemotherapy. I'm not doing too well."
But what an uncanny coincidence, he thought. Your behind and shooting myself in the ass. I'm in an eerie world, he thought. Things are behaving funny.
"I just now taped a terrific Linda Fox concert," he said. "I'll be broadcasting it in the next few days. It'll cheer you up."
Her slightly swollen face showed no response. "It's too bad we're stuck in these domes. I wish we could visit one another. The foodman was just here. In fact he brought me my medication. It's effective but it makes me throw up."
Herb Asher thought, I wish I hadn't called.
"Is there any way you could visit me?" Rybys said.
"I have no portable air, none at all." It was of course a lie.
"I have," Rybys said.
In panic he said, "But if you're sick-"
"I can make it over to your dome."
"What about your station? What if data come in that-"
"I've got a beeper I can bring with me." Presently he said, "OK."
"It would mean a lot to me, someone to sit with for a little while. The foodman stays like half an hour, but that's as long as he can. You know what he told me? There's been an outbreak of a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on CY3O VI. It must be a virus. This whole condition is a virus. Christ, I'd hate to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This is like the Mariana form."
"Is it contagious?" Herb Asher said.
She did not answer directly; she said, "What I have can be cured." Obviously she wanted to reassure him. "If the virus is around... I won't come over; it's okay." She nodded and reached to shut off her transmitter. "I'm going to lie down," she said, "and get more sleep. With this you're supposed to sleep as much as you can. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Good-bye."
"Come over," he said.
Brightening, she said, "Thank you."
"But be sure you bring your beeper. I have a hunch a lot of telemetric confirms are going to--"
"Oh, fuck the telemetric confirms!" Rybys said, with venom. "I'm so sick of being stuck in this goddam dome! Aren't you going bugward sitting around watching tape-drums turn and little meters and gauges and shit?"
"I think you should go back home," he said. "To the Sol System."
"No," she said, more calmly. "I'm going to follow exactly the M.E.D. instructions for my chemotherapy and beat this fucking M.S. I'm not going home. I'll come over and fix you dinner. I'm a good cook. My mother was Italian and my father is Chicano so I spice everything I fix, except you can't get the spices out here. But I figured out how to beat that with different synthetics. I've been experimenting."
Herb Asher said, "In this concert I'm going to be broadcasting, the Fox does a version of Dowland's 'Shall I Sue.'"
"A song about litigation?"
"No. 'Sue' in the sense of to pay court to or woo. In matters of love." And then he realized that she was putting him on.
"Do you want to know what I think of the Fox?" Rybys said. "Recycled sentimentality, which is the worst kind of sentimentality; it isn't even original. And she looks like her face is on upside down. She has a mean mouth."
"I like her," he said, stiffly; he felt himself becoming mad, really mad. I'm supposed to help you? he asked himself. Run the risk of catching what you have so you can insult the Fox?
"I'll fix you beef Stroganoff with parsley noodles," Rybys said.
"I'm doing fine," he said.
Hesitating, she said in a low, faltering voice, "Then you don't want me to come over?"
"I-" he said.
Rybys said, "I'm very frightened, Mr. Asher. Fifteen minutes from now I'm going to be throwing up from the I-V Neurotoxite. But I don't want to be alone. I don't want to give up my dome and I don't want to be by myself. I'm sorry if I offended you. It's just that to me the Fox is a joke. She is a joke media personality. She is pure hype. I won't say anything more; I promise."
"Do you have the-" He amended what he intended to say. "Are you sure it won't b
e too much for you, fixing dinner?"
"I'm stronger now than I will be," she said. "I'll be getting weaker for a long time."
"How long?"
"There's no way to tell."
He thought, You are going to die. He knew it and she knew it. They did not have to talk about it. The complicity of silence was there, the agreement. A dying girl wants to cook me a dinner, he thought. A dinner I don't want to eat. I've got to say no to her. I've got to keep her out of my dome. The insistence of the weak, he thought; their dreadful power. It is so much easier to throw a body block against the strong!
"Thank you," he said. "I'd like it very much if we had dinner together. But make sure you keep in radio contact with me on your way over here-so I'll know you're okay. Promise?"
"Well, sure," she said. "Otherwise-" She smiled. "They'd find me a century from now, frozen with pots, pans and food, as well as synthetic spices. You do have portable air, don't you?"
"No, I really don't," he said.
And knew that his lie was palpable to her.
CHAPTER 3
The meal smelled good and tasted good but halfway through Rybys Rommey excused herself and made her way unsteadily from the central matrix of the dome-his dome-into the bath- room. He tried not to listen; he arranged it with his percept system not to hear and with his cognition not to know. In the bathroom the girl, violently sick, cried out and he gritted his teeth and pushed his plate away and then all at once he got up and set in motion his in-dome audio system; he played an early album of the Fox.
Come again!
Sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces, that refrain
To do me due delight .
"Do you by any chance have some milk'?" Rybys said, standing at the bathroom door, her face pale.
Silently, he got her a glass of milk, or what passed for milk on their planet.
"I have anti-emetics," Rybys said as she held the glass of milk, "but I didn't remember to bring any with me. They're back at my dome."
"I could get them for you," he said.
"You know what M.E.D. told me?" she said, her voice heavy with indignation. "They said that this chemotherapy won't make my hair fall out but already it's coming out in-"
"Okay," he interrupted. "'Okay'?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
Rybys said, "This is upsetting you. The meal is spoiled and you're-I don't know what. If I'd remembered to bring my anti-emetics I'd be able to keep from-" She became silent. "Next time I'll bring them. I promise. This is one of the few albums of the Fox that I like. She was really good then, don't you think?"
"Yes," he said tightly.
"Linda Box," Rybys said.
"What?" he said.
"Linda the box. That's what my sister and I used to call her." She tried to smile.
He said, "Please go back to your dome."
"Oh," she said. "Well-" She smoothed her hair, her hand shaking. "Will you come with me? I don't think I can make it by myself right now. I'm really weak. I really am sick."
He thought, You are taking me with you. That's what this is. That is what is happening. You will not go alone; you will take my spirit with you. And you know. You know it as well as you know the name of the medication you are taking, and you hate me as you hate the medication, as you hate M.E.D. and your illness; it is all hate, for each and every thing under these two suns. I know you. I understand you. I see what is coming. In fact it has begun.