The Girl Who Was Plugged In - James Tiptree, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED INListen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT&T on twenty-point margin and you think you're Evel Knievel. AT&T? You doubleknit dummy, how I'd love to show you something.Look, dead daddy, I'd say. See for instance that rotten girl?In the crowd over there, that one gaping at her gods. One rotten girl in the city of the future. (That's what I said.) Watch.She's jammed among bodies, craning and peering with her soul yearning out of her eyeballs. Love! Oo-ooh, love them! Her gods are coming out of a store called Body East. Three young-bloods, larking along loverly. Dressed like simple street-people but . . . smashing. See their great eyes swivel above their nose-filters, their hands lift shyly, their inhumanly tender lips melt? Tfhe crowd moans. Love! This whole boiling megacity, this whole fun future world loves its gods.You don't believe gods, dad? Wait. Whatever turns you on, there's a god in the future for you, custom-made. Listen to this mob. "I touched his foot. Ow-oow, I TOUCHED Him!"Even the people in the GTX tower up there love the gods—in their own way and for their own reasons.The funky girl on the street, she just loves. Grooving on their beautiful lives, their mysterioso problems. No one ever told her about mortals who love a god and end up as a tree or a sighing sound. In a million years it'd never occur to her that her gods might love her back.She's squashed against the wall now as the godlings come by.398 THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED INThey move in a clear space. A holocam bobs above but its shadow never falls on them. The store display screens are magically clear of bodies as the gods glance in and a beggar underfoot is suddenly alone. They give him a token. "Aaaaah!" goes the crowd.Now one of them flashes some wild new kind of timer and they all trot to catch a shuttle, just like people. The shuttle stops for them—more magic. The crowd sighs, closing back. The gods are gone.(In a room far from—but not unconnected to—the GTX tower a molecular flipflop closes too, and three account tapes spin.)Our girl is still stuck by the wall while guards and holocam equipment pull away. The adoration's fading from her face. That's good, because now you can see she's the ugly of the world. A tall monument to pituitary dystrophy. No surgeon would touch her. When she smiles, her jaw—it's half purple-almost bites her left eye out. She's also quite young, but who could care?The crowd is pushing her along now, treating you to glimpses of her jumbled torso, her mismatched legs. At the corner she strains to send one last fond spasm after the godlings' shuttle. Then her face reverts to its usual expression of dim pain and she lurches onto the moving walkway, stumbling into people. The walkway junctions with another. She crosses, trips and collides with the casualty rail. Finally she comes out into a little place called a park. The sportshow is working, a basketball game in 3-di is going on right overhead. But all she does is squeeze onto a bench and huddle there while a ghostly free-throw goes by her ear.After that nothing at all happens except a few furtive hand-mouth gestures which don't even interest her benchmates.But you're curious about the city? So ordinary after all, in the FUTURE?Ah, there's plenty to swing with here—and it's not all that far in the future, dad. But pass up the sci-fi stuff for now, like for instance the holovision technology that's put TV and radio in museums. Or the worldwide carrier field bouncing down from satellites, controlling communication and transport systems all overJames Tiptree, Jr.399the globe. That was a spin-off from asteroid mining, pass it by. We're watching that girl.I'll give you just one goodie. Maybe you noticed on the sportshow or the streets? No commercials. No ads.That's right. NO ADS. An eyeballer for you.Look around. Not a billboard, sign, slogan, jingle, skywrite, blurb, sublimflash, in this whole fun world. Brand names? Only in those ticky little peep-screens on the stores and you could hardly call that advertising. How does that finger you?Think about it. That girl is still sitting there.She's parked right under the base of the GTX tower as a matter of fact. Look way up and you can see the sparkles from the bubble on top, up there among the domes of godland. Inside that bubble is a boardroom. Neat bronze shield on the door: Global Transmissions Corporation—not that that means anything.I happen to know there's six people in that room. Five of them technically male, and the sixth isn't easily thought of as a mother. They are absolutely unremarkable. Those faces were seen once at their nuptials and will show again in their obituaries and impress nobody either time. If you're looking for the secret Big Blue Meanies of the world, forget it. I know. Zen, do I know! Flesh? Power? Glory? You'd horrify them.What they do like up there is to have things orderly, especially their communications. You could say they've dedicated their lives to that, to freeing the world from garble. Their nightmares are about hemorrhages of information: channels screwed up, plans misimplemented, garble creeping in. Their gigantic wealth only worries them, it keeps opening new vistas of disorder. Luxury? They wear what their tailors put on them, eat what their cooks serve them. See that old boy there—his name is Isham— he's sipping water and frowning as he listens to a databall. The water was prescribed by his medistaff. It tastes awful. The databall also contains a disquieting message about his son, Paul.But it's time to go back down, far below to our girl. Look!She's toppled over sprawling on the ground.A tepid commotion ensues among the bystanders. The consensus is she's dead, which she disproves by bubbling a little. And presently she's taken away by one of the superb ambulancesTHE GEKL WHO WAS PLUGGED DTof the future, which are a real improvement over ours when one happens to be around.At the local bellevue the usual things are done by the usual team of clowns aided by a saintly mop-pusher. Our girl revives enough to answer the questionnaire without which you can't die, even in the future. Finally she's cast up, a pumped-out hulk on a cot in the long, dim ward.Again nothing happens for a while except that her eyes leak a little from the understandable disappointment of finding herself still alive.But somewhere one GTX computer has been tickling another, and toward midnight something does happen. First comes an attendant who pulls screens around her. Then a man in a business doublet comes daintily down the ward. He motions the attendant to strip off the sheet and go.The groggy girl-brute heaves up, big hands clutching at bodyparts you'd pay not to see."Burke? P. Burke, is that your name?""Y-yes." Croak. "Are you. . . policeman?""No. They'll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide's a felony."". . . I'm sorry."He has a 'corder in his hand. "No family, right?""No.""You're seventeen. One year city college. What did you study?""La-languages.""H'm. Say something."Unintelligible rasp.He studies her. Seen close, he's not so elegant. Errand-boy type. ^^"Why did you try to kill yourself?" ^She stares at him with dead-rat dignity, hauling up the gray sheet. Give him a point, he doesn't ask twice."Tell me, did you see Breath this afternoon?"Dead as she nearly is, that ghastly love-look wells up. Breath is the three young gods, a loser's cult. Give the man another point, he interprets her expression."How would you like to meet them?"lames Tiptree, Jr. 401The girl's eyes bug out grotesquely."I have a job for someone like you. It's hard work. If you did well you'd be meeting Breath and stars like that all the time."Is he insane? She's deciding she really did die."But it means you never see anybody you know again. Never, ever. You will be legally dead. Even the police won't know. Do you want to try?"It all has to be repeated while her great jaw slowly sets. Show me the fire I walk through. Finally P. Burke's prints are in his 'corder, the man holding up the rancid girl-body without a sign of distaste. It makes you wonder what else he does.And then-THE MAGIC. Sudden silent trot of litterbearers tucking P. Burke into something quite different from a bellevue stretcher, the oiled slide into the daddy of all luxury ambulances —real flowers in that holder!—and the long jarless rush to nowhere. Nowhere is warm and gleaming and kind with nurses. (Where did you hear that money can't buy genuine kindness?) And clean clouds folding P. Burke into bewildered sleep.. . . Sleep which merges into feedings and washings and more sleeps, into drowsy moments of afternoon where midnight should be, and gentle businesslike voices and friendly (but very few) faces, and endless painless hyposprays and peculiar numbnesses. And later comes the steadying rhythm of days and nights, and a quickening which P. Burke doesn't identify as health, but only knows that the fungus place in her armpit is gone. And then she's up and following those few new faces with growing trust, first tottering, then walking strongly, all better now, clumping down the short hall to the tests, tests, tests, and the other things.And here is our girl, looking—If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)The disimprovement in her looks comes from the electrode jack...
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]