He waited.
"Is she ready?" Susan asked. "Have the doctors said something I hadn"t heard?"
"Thirty days of immune-system prep, and she can receive a double eye transplant. I talked to d.i.c.k after Health Board yesterday. She can go over and choose a pair tomorrow."
"Choose eyes?" Noah said. "Gutwrenching!"
"What if I, what if I don"t want to," Esther said.
"Don"t want to? Don"t want to see?"
She did not look at either of them. Her mother was silent.
"You would be giving in to fear, which is natural, but unworthy of you. And so you would merely cheat yourself out of so many weeks or months of perfect vision."
"But it says I"m at the age of reason. So I can make my own choices."
"Of course you can, and will. You"ll make the reasonable choice. I have confidence in you, Daughter. Show me that it"s justified."
Immune-system prep was nearly as bad as decontamination. Some days she couldn"t pay attention to anything but the tubes and machines. Other days she felt human enough to get bored and be glad when Noah came to the Health Center to see her. "Hey," he said, "did you hear about the Hag? All kinds of people over in Urban have seen her. It started with this baby getting excited, and then its mother saw her, and then a whole bunch of people did. She"s supposed to be real small and old, and she"s sort of Asian, you know, with those eyes like Yukio and Fred have, but she"s all bent over and her legs are weird. And she goes around picking up stuff off the deck, like it was litter, only nothing"s there, and she puts it in this bag she has. And when they walk toward her she just goes out of sight. And she has this real gut mouth without any teeth in it."
"Is the burned woman still around?"
"Well, some women in Florida were having some committee meeting, and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting at the table and they were black. And they all looked at them, and they just like went out of sight."
"Wow," Esther said.
"Dad got himself on this Emergency Committee with mostly psychologists, and they have it all worked out about ma.s.s hallucination and environmental deprivation and like that. He"ll tell you all about it."
"Yeah, he will."
"Hey Es."
"Hey No."
"Are they, I mean. Is it. Do they."
"Yeah," she said. "First they take out the old ones. Then they put in the new ones. Then they do the wiring."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"Did you really have to like, go and choose..."
"No. The meds pick out whatever"s most compatible genetically. They got some nice Jewish eyes for me."
"Honest?"
"I was kidding. Maybe."
"It"ll be great if you can see really well," Noah said, and she heard in his voice for the first time the huskiness like a double-reed instrument, oboe or ba.s.soon, the first breaking.
"Hey, have you got your Satyagraha tape, I want to hear that," she said. They shared a pa.s.sion for twentieth-century opera.
"It has no intellectual complexity," Noah said in Ike"s intonation. "I find an absence of thought."
"Yeah," said Esther, "and it"s all in Sanskrit"
Noah put on the last act. They listened to the tenor singing ascending scales in Sanskrit. Esther closed her eyes. The high, pure voice went up and up, like mountain peaks above the mists.
"We can be optimistic," the doctor said.
"What do you mean?" Susan said.
"They can"t guarantee, Sue," Ike said.
"Why not? This was presented as a routine procedure!"
"In an ordinary case-"
"Are there ordinary cases?"
"Yes," the doctor said. "And this one is extraordinary. The operation was absolutely trouble free. So was the IS prep. However her current reaction raises the possibility-a low probability but a possibility-of partial or total rejection."
"Blindness."
"Sue, you know that even if she rejects these implants, they can try again."
"Electronic implants might in fact be the better course. They"ll preserve optical function and give spatial orientation. And there are sonar headbands for periods of visual nonfunction."
"So we can be optimistic," Susan said.
"Guardedly," said the doctor.
"I let you do this," Susan said. "I let you do this, and I could have stopped you." She turned away from him and went down the corridor.
He was due at the Bays, overdue in fact, but he walked across Urban to the farther elevator bank instead of dropping straight down from the Health Center. He needed a moment to be alone and think. This whole thing about Esther"s operation was hard to handle, on top of the ma.s.s-hysteria phenomena, and now if Susan was going to let him down... He kept feeling a driving, aching need to be alone. Not to sit with Esther, not to talk to doctors, not to reason with Susan, not to go to committee meetings, not to listen to hysterics reporting their hallucinations-just to be alone, sitting at his Schoenfeldt screen, in the night, in peace.
"Look at that," said a tall man, Laxness of EVAC, stopping beside Ike in Urban Square and staring. "What next? What do you think is really going on, Rose?"
Ike followed Laxness" gaze. He saw the high brick and stone facades of Urban and a boy crossing the street-corridor.
"The kid?"
"Yes. My G.o.d. Look at them."
The kid was gone, but Laxness kept staring, and swallowed as if he felt sick.
"He"s gone, Morten."
"They must be from some famine," Laxness said, his gaze unwavering. "You know, the first couple of times, I thought they were holovid projections. I thought somebody had to be doing this to us. Somebody with a screw loose, in Communications or something."
"We"ve investigated that possibility," Ike said.
"Look at their arms. Jesus!"
"There"s nothing there, Morten."
Laxness looked at him. "Are you blind?"
"There is nothing there."
Laxness stared at him as if he were the hallucination. "What I think it is, is our guilt," he said, looking back at whatever it was he saw across the Square. "But what are we supposed to do? I don"t understand." He started forward suddenly, striding with purpose, and then stopped and looked around with the distressed, embarra.s.sed expression Ike was getting used to seeing on people"s faces when their hallucinations popped.
Ike came on past him. He wanted to say something to Laxness, but did not know what to say.
As he entered the streetlike corridor he had a curious sensation of pushing into and through a substance, or substances or presences, crowded thickly, not impeding him, not palpable, only many non-touches like very slight electric shocks on his arms and shoulders, breaths across his face, an intangible resistance. He walked ahead, came to the elevators, dropped down to the Bays. The elevator was full, but he was the only person in it.
"Hey Ike. Seen any ghosts yet?" Hal Bauerman said cheerfully.
"No."
"Me neither. I feel sort of left out. Here"s the print on the Driver specs, with the new stuff fed in."
"Mort Laxness was seeing things up in Urban just now. He"s not one I would have picked as hysterical."
"Ike," said Larane Gutierrez, the shop a.s.sistant, "n.o.body is hysterical. These people are here."
"What people?"
"The people from Earth."
"We"re all from Earth, as far as I know."
"I mean the people everybody sees."
"I don"t. Hal doesn"t. Rod doesn"t-"
"Seen some," Rod Bond muttered. "I don"t know. It"s real crazy, I know, Ike, but all those people that were hanging around Pueblo Corridor all day yesterday-I know you can walk through them, but everybody saw them-they were like washing out a lot of cloths and wringing out the water. It was like some old tape in anthro or something."
"A group delusion-"
"-isn"t what"s going on," Larane snapped. She was shrill, aggressive. At any disagreement, Ike thought, she always got strident. "These people are here, Ike, And there"s more of them all the time."
"So the ship is full of real people that you can walk through?"
"Good way to get a lot of people in a small s.p.a.ce," Hal observed, with a fixed grin.
"And whatever you see is real, of course, even if I don"t see it?"
"I don"t know what you see," Larane said. "I don"t know what"s real. I know that they"re here. I don"t know who they are; maybe we have to find out. The ones I saw yesterday looked like they were from some really primitive culture, they had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful-the people, I mean. Well fed and very alert-looking, watchful. I had a feeling for the first time they might be seeing us, not just us seeing them, but I wasn"t sure."
Rod was nodding agreement.
"Next thing is you start talking with them, then? Hi folks, welcome to Spes?"
"So far, if you get close, they just sort of aren"t there, but people are getting closer," she answered quite seriously.
"Larane," Ike said, "do you hear yourself ? Rod? Listen, if I came to you and said Hey, guess what, a s.p.a.ce alien with three heads has beamed aboard from his flying saucer and here he is- What"s wrong? Don"t you see him? Can"t you see him, Larane? Rod? You don"t? But I do! And you do, too, don"t you, Hal, you see the three-headed s.p.a.ce alien?"
"Sure," Hal said. "Little green b.u.g.g.e.r."
"Do you believe us?"
"No," Larane said. "Because you"re lying. But we"re not."
"Then you"re insane."
"To deny what I and the people with me see, that would be just as insane."
"Hey, this is a really interesting ontological debate," Hal said, "but we"re about twenty-five minutes overdue on the Driver specs report, folks."
Working late that night in his cube, Ike felt the soft electric thrilling along his arras and back, the sense of crowding, a murmur below the threshold of hearing, a smell of sweat or musk or human breath. He put his head in his hands for a minute, then looked up again at the Schoenfeldt screen and spoke as if talking to it. "You cannot let this happen," he said. "This is all the hope we have."
The cube was empty, the still air was odorless.
He worked on for a while. When he came to bed he lay beside his wife"s deep, sleeping silence. She was as far from him as another world.
And Esther lay in the hospital in her permanent darkness. No, not permanent. Temporary. A healing darkness. She would see.
"What are you doing, Noah?"
The boy was standing at the washstand, gazing down into the bowl, which was half full of water. His expression was rapt. He said, "Watching the goldfish. They came out of the tap."
"The question is this: to what extent does the concept of illusion usefully describe a shared experience with elements of interactivity?"
"Well," Jaime said, "the interactivity could itself be illusory. Joan of Arc and her voices." But there was no conviction in his own voice, and Helena, who seemed to have taken over the leadership of the Emergency Committee, pursued: "What do you think of inviting some of our guests to sit in on this meeting?"