Spider Robinson - God is an Iron

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2024-11-23 0 0 39.99KB 13 页 5.9玖币

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GOD IS AN IRON

By Spider Robinson

I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight of her was shocking. She was sitting in a tan

plastic-surfaced armchair, the kind where the front comes up as the back goes down. It was back as far

as it would go. It was placed beside the large living-room window, whose curtains were drawn. A plastic

block table next to it held a digital clock, a dozen unopened packages of Peter Jackson cigarettes, a glass

jar full of packs of matches, an empty ashtray, a full vial of cocaine, and . a lamp with a bulb of at least

150 watts. It illuminated her with brutal clarity.

She was naked. Her skin was the color of vanilla pudding. Her hair was in rats, her nails unpainted

and untended, some overlong and some broken. There was dust on her. She sat in a ghastly sludge of

feces and urine. Dried vomit

was caked on her chin and between her breasts and down her ribs to the chair.

These were only part of what I had smelled. The predominant odor was of fresh baked bread. It is

the smell of a person who is starving to death. The combined effluvia had prepared me to find a senior

citizen, paralyzed by a stroke or some such crisis.

I judged her to be about twenty-five years old.

I moved to where she could see me, and she did not see me. That was probably just as well, because

I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went

off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the

surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile.

The second most horrible thing was the one that explained all the rest. From where I now stood I

could see a triple socket in the wall beneath the window. Into it were plugged the lamp, the clock, and

her.

I knew about wire heading, of course-I had lost a couple of acquaintances and one friend to the

juice. But I had never seen a wirehead. It is by definition a solitary vice, and all the public usually gets to

see is a sheeted figure being carried out to the wagon.

The transformer lay on the floor beside the chair where it had been dropped. The switch was on,

and the timer had been jiggered so that instead of providing one five- or ten- or fifteen-

second jolt per hour it allowed continuous flow. That timer is required by law on all juice rigs sold, and

you need special tools to defeat it. Say, a nail file. The input cord was long, fell in crazy coils from the

wall socket. The output cord disappeared beneath the chair, but I knew where it ended. It ended in the

tangled snarl of her hair, at the crown of her head, ended in a miniplug. The plug was snapped into a

jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet

jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure

center of her brain was located. She had sat there in total transcendent ecstasy for at least five days.

I moved, finally. I moved closer, which surprised me. She saw me now, and impossibly the smile

became a bit wider. I was marvelous. I was captivating. I was her perfect lover. I could not look at the

smile; a small plastic tube ran from one corner of the smile and my eyes followed it gratefully. It was

held in place by small bits of surgical tape at her jaw, neck, and shoulder, and from there it ran in a lazy

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curve to the big fifty-liter water-cooler bottle on the floor. She had plainly meant her suicide to last: She

had arranged to die of hunger rather than thirst, which would have been quicker. She could take a drink

when she happened to think of it; and if she forgot, what the hell.

My intention must have showed on my face, and I think she even understood it-the smile began to

fade. That decided me. I moved before

she could force her neglected body to react, whipped the plug out of the wall and stepped back warily.

Her body did not go rigid as if galvanized. It had already been so for many days. What it did was the

exact opposite, and the effect was just as striking. She seemed to shrink. Her eyes slammed shut. She

slumped. Well, I thought, it'll be a long day and night before she can move a voluntary muscle again,

and then she hit me before I knew she had left the chair, breaking my nose with the heel of one fist and

bouncing the other off the side of my head. We cannoned off each other and I managed to keep on my

feet; she whirled and grabbed the lamp. Its cord was stapled to the floor and would not yield, so she set

her feet and yanked and it snapped off clean at the base. In near-total darkness she raised the lamp on

high and came to me, and I lunged inside the arc of her swing and punched her in the solar plexus. She

said guff! and went down.

I staggered to a couch and sat down and felt my nose and fainted.

I don't think I was out very long. The blood tasted fresh. I woke with a sense of terrible urgency. It took

me a while to work out why. When someone has been simultaneously starved and unceasingly

stimulated for days on end, it is not the best idea in the world to depress that someone's respiratory

center. I lurched to my feet.

It was not completely dark; there was a moon somewhere out there. She lay on her back, arms

at her side, perfectly relaxed. Her ribs rose and fell in great slow swells. A pulse showed strongly at her

throat. As I knelt beside her she began to snore, deeply and rhythmically.

I had time for second thoughts, now. It seemed incredible that my impulsive action had not killed her.

Perhaps that had been my subconscious intent. Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her,

let alone sudden cold turkey.

I probed in the tangle of hair, found the empty jack. The hair around it was dry. If she hadn't torn the

skin in yanking herself loose, it was unlikely that she had sustained any more serious damage within. I

continued probing, found no soft places on the skull. Her forehead felt cool and sticky to my hand. The

fecal smell was overpowering the baking bread now, sourly fresh.

There was no pain in my nose yet, but it felt immense and pulsing. I did not want to touch it, or to think

about it. My shirt was soaked with blood; I tossed it into a corner. It took everything I had to lift her. She

was unreasonably heavy, and I have carried drunks and corpses. There was a hall off the living room,

and all halls lead to a bathroom. I headed that way in a clumsy staggering trot, and just as I reached the

deeper darkness, with my pulse at its maximum, my nose woke up and began screaming. I nearly

dropped her then and clapped my hands to my face; the temptation was overwhelming. Instead I

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Spider Robinson - God is an Iron

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