Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, Ipondered the possibility that I was nuts.
It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and eventhough there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.
I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and Iwas living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.
We met in orbit, where I’d gone to experience the famed low-gravitysybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at tento the neg eight, it’s a blast. You don’t stagger, you bounce, and whenyou’re bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous nakedpeople, things get deeply fun.
I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter,filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity,deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere’s floor, andif you knew how to play, you’d snag one, tether it to you and start playing.
Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes variedfrom terrific to awful, but they were always energetic.
I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever Ithought I had a nice bit nailed, I’d spend some time in the sphere playingit. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interestinglines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn’t, playing aninstrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.
Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouseruns in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movementon a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to adawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it wasreally good. I’m a sucker for musicians.
We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously asspheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into76the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perpwho killed her partner.
I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble.
The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud.
She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed forthe hatch.
I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperateto reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.
“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I’m Julius! How’re you doing?”
She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unitsimultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” shesaid, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoningchub-on.
I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke ofthe station towards the gravity.
She had a pianist’s body—re-engineered arms and hands thatstretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand’sgrace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as Icould on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-geerim of the station, she was gone.
I didn’t find her again until the next movement was done and I wentto the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up whenshe passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.
This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to herbefore moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano’s top,looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 timeand I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rockto folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, Inoodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I manageda smidge of tuneful wit.
She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, reddowny fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter’s style, suited to theclimate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was datingLil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.
I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at thekeyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularlykicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave77her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, Imaneuvered my way between her and the hatch.
When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but Isummoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmlyuntied and floated over to me.
I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I’d been staringinto all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their cornersand spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me,then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again.
“You’ll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across thestation.
We didn’t sleep.
Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadbandconstellations that went up at the cusp of the world’s ascent into Bitchunry.
She’d been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generallybecome pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewilderingarray of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes thatsaw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversibleknee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn’t prone toany of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lowerbackpain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.
I thought I lived for fun, but I didn’t have anything on Zed. She onlytalked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn’tdo, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whimthat crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bareskinnedand spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangleher twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days,floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior.
She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I waswatching. Or maybe she didn’t, and she was making faces for anyone’sbenefit.
But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless andher eyes full of the stars she’d seen and her metallic skin cool with thebreath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through thestation, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoidof rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and78shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupteda thousand acts of coitus.
You’d have thought that we’d have followed it up with an act of ourown, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we startedthe game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did.
Halfway through, I’d lose track of carnal urges and return to a state ofchildlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the gigglyfeeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageouscorner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazypair that’s always zipping in and zipping away, like having your partycrashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.
When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live withme until the universe’s mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked mynose and my willie and shouted, “YOU’LL DO!”
I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories undergroundin overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn’tso hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel athome while affording her opportunities for mischief.
But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. Atfirst, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finallyacting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking themwith endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up thesteeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, hereyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silverhad been inscrutable.
We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphonyin low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, andshe came out and didn’t play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiledwith a smile that never went beyond her lips.
She went nuts.
She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. Sheaccused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors’ apartments,wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.
She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of ourbedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. Ismiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed herand hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor’s office on the second79floor. She’d been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took methat long to face up to it.
The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way ofsaying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In otherwords, I’d driven her nuts.
You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically tryingto talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn’t want to.
She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of luciditythat she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from abackup that was made before we came to Toronto.
I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared awritten synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she readit over the next couple days.
“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterraneanapartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediatelythat the news wouldn’t be good.
“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups ofcoffee.
“I’m going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.” Shehad a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.
Oh, shit. “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventoryof my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I’llpack up. I miss space, too.”
She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazeleyes. “No. I’m going back to who I was, before I met you.”
It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her funand mischief. The Zed she’d become after we wed was terrible and terrifying,but I’d stuck with her out of respect for the person she’d been.
Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she metme. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revertto a saved version.
Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.
I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in thesphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from hiships. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano,and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn’t a shred of recognition inthem. She’d never met me.
80I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning toDisney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, anew career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil,who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazyexes.
If I was nuts, it wasn’t the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone.
It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotagingmy enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend’s arms.
I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we’d run the rehabpast the ad-hoc’s general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.
I pulled on last night’s clothes and walked out to the Monorail stationin the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, brightand cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried tomake myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they keptturning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform tokeep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.
The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland,just steps from where I’d been turned into a road-pizza by thestill-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the LibertySquare crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so theyhad given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sunstreamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filledshafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums andthe spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-keyambient buzz from two of the Park’s oldest rides.
There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almostall second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filledthe room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking beforethe meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was toosmall for the de rigeur ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able tostand at a podium and command a smidge of respect.
“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still presentaround her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert atputting on a brave face no matter what the ache.
The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at theirown corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the MagicKingdom.
81“Everybody knows why we’re here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecatingsmile. She’d been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Doesanyone have any questions about the plans? We’d like to start executingright away.”
A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in theair. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ doyou mean—”
I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We’re on an eight-week productionschedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be finished.”
The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. Ishrugged. Politics was not my game.
Lil said, “Don, we’re trying something new here, a really streamlinedprocess. The good part is, the process is short. In a couple months, we’llknow if it’s working for us. If it’s not, hey, we can turn it around in acouple months, too. That’s why we’re not spending as much time planningas we usually do. It won’t take five years for the idea to prove out,so the risks are lower.”
Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherlydemeanor said, “I’m all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn’talways been that hot. But I’m concerned about all these new people youpropose to recruit—won’t having more people slow us down when itcomes to making new decisions?”
No, I thought sourly, because the people I’m bringing in aren’t addictedto meetings.
Lil nodded. “That’s a good point, Lisa. The offer we’re making to thetelepresence players is probationary—they don’t get to vote until afterwe’ve agreed that the rehab is a success.”
Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, selfimportantjerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blewhis spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “Ithink you’re really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, allof us, and so do the guests. It’s a piece of history, and we’re its custodians,not its masters. Changing it like this, well …” he shook his head.
“It’s not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhousewith guys jumping out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’
they’d go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion’sbetter than that. I can’t be a part of this plan.”
82I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I’d delivered essentiallythe same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra’s work—andhearing it from this jerk in reference to mine made me go all hot and redinside.
“Look,” I said. “If we don’t do this, if we don’t change things, they’llget changed for us. By someone else. The question, Dave, is whether a responsiblecustodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, orwhether he does everything he can to make sure that he’s still around toensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn’tsticking your head in the sand.”
I could tell I wasn’t doing any good. The mood of the crowd was gettingdarker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until themeeting was done, no matter what the provocation.
Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and itlooked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night andall the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all atthe same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervoussmoothing of her hair over her ears.
Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collectedin secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group’s eyesunfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolledin. I was offline and unable to vote or watch.
At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her handsbehind her back.
“All right then,” she said, over the crowd’s buzz. “Let’s get to work.”
I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other’s eyes, a meaningfulglance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My visionwashed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. Itook two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to saysomething horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right sidewent numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to thefloor.
The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as Itried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black.
I wasn’t nuts after all.
The doctor’s office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and whiteand decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors’ whites with an83outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that remindedme to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bringmy hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the overcheerfulsignage, and discovered that I couldn’t move my arms. Furtherinvestigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, infull-on four-point restraint.
“Waaagh,” I said again.
Dan’s worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a seriouslookingdoctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full ofcrow’sfeet and smile-lines.
“Welcome back, Julius. I’m Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindlyvoice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmemberbullshit, I found his schtick comforting.
I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyesand consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, tooconfounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. Thedoc would tell me what was going on when he was ready.
“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently.
Being tied up wasn’t my idea of a good time.
The doc smiled kindly. “I think it’s for the best, for now. Don’t worry,Julius, we’ll have you up and about soon enough.”
Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him outof the room. He took my hand instead.
My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until itwas all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip ofmy nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. Thedoc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched mynose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nutsdidn’t start itching anytime soon.
Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that causedthe head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye.
“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you’ve got a problem.
Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than amonth. It sure would’ve been better if you’d come in to see me when itstarted up.
“But you didn’t, and things got worse.” He nodded up at JiminyCricket’s recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It’s good advice, son,but what’s done is done. You were restored from a backup about eight84weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can’t be sure, but my theory isthat the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a materialdefect. It’s been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. Theshut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducingthe kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interfacesenses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnosticmode, attempts to fix itself and come back online.
“Well, that’s fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it’s badnews. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it’s only a matterof time before it does some serious damage.”
“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, All right, but what’s wrong withmy mouth?
The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don’t try. The interface has lockedup, and it’s taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. Intime, it’ll probably shut down, but for now, there’s no point. That’s whywe’ve got you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard whenthey brought you in, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Probably shut down? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. Istarted shaking.
The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed atransdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal’s sedativeoozed into my bloodstream.
“There, there,” he said. “It’s nothing permanent. We can grow you anew clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, thatbackup is a few months old. If we’d caught it earlier, we may’ve beenable to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you’ve displayedto date … Well, there just wouldn’t be any point.”
My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, neverhappened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shamefulattempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. Myplans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away.
I couldn’t do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who understoodhow it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the adhocswould surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave ithalf-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a softbelly for Debra to savage.
I wouldn’t be restoring from backup.
85I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shutitself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobesand uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the secondhappened without waking me from deep unconsciousness.
When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had aday’s growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly rejuvenatedeyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head.
“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I’ve drawn up the consentforms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two.
In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore’sbeen completed, we’ll retire this body for you and we’ll be all finishedup.”
Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.
“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under mycontrol!
“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperationslip through. “There’s nothing else for it. If you’d come to me whenit all started, well, we might’ve had other options. You’ve got no one toblame but yourself.”
“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won’t sign.”
Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the restraintsand his grip held me fast. “You’ve got to do it, Julius. It’s for thebest,” he said.
“I’m not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. Hisfingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond thenormal call of duty.
“No one’s killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knewhow old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It’s just the opposite:
we’re saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. Theseizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don’twant that.”
I thought of Zed’s spectacular transformation into a crazy person. No,I sure don’t. “I don’t care about the interface. Chop it out. I can’t do itnow.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”
86The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of theroom and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge workas he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait.
No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have beenten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn’t know it untilurgent necessity made the discovery for me.
When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized:
a HERF gun.
Oh, it wasn’t the same model I’d used on the Hall of Presidents. Thisone was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgicaltool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,”
he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, he knows, he knows,the Hall of Presidents. But he didn’t know. That episode was locked inmy mind, invulnerable to backup.
“I know,” I said.
“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface’sshielding and fuse it. It probably won’t turn you into a vegetable.
That’s the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your lastbackup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He’d dropped allkindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. Iwas pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had allbut obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery whenyou can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Somepeople swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.
I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of theutilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineeringcompound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: usingthe HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood.
They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger.
The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. Hesealed the cage and retreated to the lab’s door. He pulled a heavy apronand helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door.
“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger.
I’ll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun onthe floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I haveno desire to find out I’m wrong.”
He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, densewith its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone.
87I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found thetrigger-stud.
I paused. This wouldn’t kill me, but it might lock the interface forever,paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I wouldnever be able to pull the trigger. The doc must’ve known, too—this washis way of convincing me to let him do that restore.
I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!”
The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, andthere was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.
I had no more interface.
The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on thegurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tooland pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitryin it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no moreadvanced than nature had made me.
The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I’dthrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab undermy own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertentisometric exercises of my seizure.
Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall.
The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catchingthe doc’s in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan’s old lineof work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged thedoc’s arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. Myold pal, the action hero.
Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physicalstate and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supportingme. I didn’t have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep.
“I’m taking you home,” he said. “We’ll fight Debra off tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram.
But we didn’t go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary,and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stoodawkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, asI collapsed into the bed that was mine now.
With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the housewe’d shared.
88I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, andadded a mood-equalizer that he’d recommended to control my“personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.