Robinson, Spider - God is an Iron

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Spider%20Robinson%20-%20God%20is%20an%20Iron.txt

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 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

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