THE DAY THE DAM BROKE.

by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Of course James Thurber was from Columbus but I don't think he was Italian. The information meant to tempt someone to Colum bus for post-doc study-intervention in the plague zone emphasized an Italian neighborhood. I imagined being able to buy fresh buffalo mozzarella every morning, bundles of fragrant green basil, fresh bread, and Reggiano cheese cut from a jealous wheel, crumbling deliciously at the edges into shards I could gobble from stiff paper or nibble between sips of cappuccino or pale wine.

Dream on, Julia. Maybe before the millennium, but not now. The information I latched onto in the L.A. dome was, shall we say, a bit out of date.

One of my grandfathers was actually born in Columbus, which was a point in its favor. Now when he leaps from my cabin wall for a chat--n.o.body else to chat with up here in the Canadian Rockies, though I do wait for You--brief auras, fleeting pic tures, of old Ohio eddy from him, corridors of time which shimmer back to the great forests, cool, slow-moving Indian rivers, and then pre-history when the great land swelled and moved without regard to how we felt about it, fleas upon its shuddering thin skin.

Well, that's what I wanted. Good food. Additional personal depth. The opportunity to make my mark as one of the hot-shot nanplague meds of the time.

And a chance to get out of the dome.

Those pure enclaves dotted the world like the plastic bub bles they put over smallpox vaccinations in the nineteen fifties so the kids wouldn't pick the scabs off too soon. I hypered into that odd little tidbit while researching plagues. I felt like part of a vaccine against the nanotech disasters of the recent past, the disasters which still had not ended. As we were to learn. I ached to be able to help make everything safe enough so that we could remove the G.o.dd.a.m.ned domes, those sad ellipsoidal barriers to the sky and stars and to what I saw as Life.

Fine they said go. You think medicine is all G.E. That's genetic engineering and I did. Inhalants in which DNA rode to the rescue on viral steeds. Wait till you get out in the sticks. Far from us. Far from the Links--communication was touch and go at that point but better than now! I must tell you that I am an old woman. That depends on your definition of old of course but I was born pre-mil, 1999, and it is now . . . can it be? Oh, I'm just teasing you it is, it is truly, twenty. Ninety-three. 2093. And this took place when I was a young whippersnapper, as Thurber's grandfather might say, caught up in the RWF, Radio Wave Fibrillation, and the Great Panic, and there I was, alone without medical backup (or willing patients either so it didn't really matter) and no fresh mozzarella either, if there ever had been any. At least I have the latter now.

Maybe that's what I wanted most all along.

I don't digress; press your ears to what must now pa.s.s for my heart--the radio.

If the technology is the same as now, and fibrillation has briefly ceased, use the purple infrabar. That will give you the correct screen; then program in the code CT2.1 for automatic fine tuning. I don't know what color or even what form access to radio waves may take further down the road and therefore I have prepared this in airborne nan form as well--doubtful, doubtful that it would ever be breathed by other humans, given my remoteness but if so you will learn how I battled the Great Midcentury Plague and how I lost, like everyone else I presume. And, if it's not too far past now for you (this might bounce forever through the aether), at the end of the broadcast file I'll give you directions on how to find me, and a map if it is breathed, for I do enjoy visitors. I truly do. At least I think I do. Please, please come visit me. I toss this into the air frequently, straight up, without regard for possible vandals for after all I know more than you do and if I don't surely you are more kind than those who know less, for I believe that information grows compa.s.sion. Allow a young-old woman her fantasies. I grow basil, by the way, in a little plot outside my cabin door, and cilantro, and ma.s.ses of poppies which thrive in the long cool summer.

More clues later. Proceed. Beep! (Sorry, but one gets silly with only a dog for company, genetically engineered though he may be.) And speaking of silly, those satellites rained information down upon us like silly rain, let me tell you, silly because one couldn't count on them. But you can count on me. Real sourdough bread, and I grow and grind and boil my own soybeans and make tofu so you see I am the real article. Protein ahead! Hurry! Turn up the gain and maybe that will help.

At any rate--back to the trip from L.A. to Columbus--my maglev arrived at your station a week late and I was happy and relieved to get there at all since the last maglev had been blown up somewhere in eastern Kansas (I learned after I had left L.A.) and then they gave me the wrong sheets.

They? No. That's imprecise. Yes, I know, and you know that I do, and you will know more if you continue. But for the benefit of other listeners . . . for posterity, you know . . .

Oh I know it sounds like a nightmare, what we all dreaded at the time, the wrong sheets, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. They pumped me full of Midwesternism.

Those gorgeous clear nansheets with blinking infolights taught me how to grow corn when the flood tide on the Great Miami River receded and other information more applicable to my present situation than anything I ever learned in L.A. no matter how accelerated, and so I can't complain. Those erroneous sheets helped me survive out here and were I not so cynical might have made me a mystic. They upped my empathy with the strange outcast population I was coming to help though the people of Columbus d.a.m.n well didn't want any help, not from the likes of me, the nanotech enemy. The sheet-empathy was particularly interesting after living domed all my life with all the cultural depth of your typical AI, intelligence incestuous and terribly inward-pointing. So you can see why I love the sky so much, and why I perch just below a ridgetop, south-facing, away from the fiercest, coldest winds. My synaptic code was one or two bits off, out of a billion, but I was sick that day, with a runny nose, so I thought that virus had something to do with my little history lesson, why I learned about corn and how my ancestors survived in the deep woods, and the basics of building one's own radio in the attic as if I were a boy in midcentury Ohio. At least that's what I thought at the time, and that's why I thought Thurber's vignettes were suddenly a part of my mind. Now, of course, we know differently. And one of us knew differently at the time it happened. It all worked out for the best, though; I don't mind!

But I see that you want real people, real settings, real things happening, not an old lady's rumination (truth to tell I look even younger than I did, now, and so of course do you, all new and unwrinkled, emerging from your coc.o.o.n. The wild buffalo would call me medicine woman and bow on their s.h.a.ggy knees and the Puritans would call me witch and the pomos would call me visionary genius. I know this because when the blizzards wrap me round with whiteness I sometimes call up my grandfather, and we discuss such weighty matters and wish he still had a mouth with which to eat my very good buffalo-b.u.t.termilk cornbread).

Perhaps I like it here so much because it's all edges--the edge of a survivable climate; the edge of myself, quite sharp; perhaps sharper than you bargained for. A different edge is not far from you, either, I'm afraid. Yes, yes, the plague. Allow me to stuff another log into the stove. (Crunch of embers, rain of orange sparks flying upward.) I buffaloed this log in, up and over the high pa.s.s, snagged last month from the Pointed Fir Lodge, a guestless retro-hotel in ski country. It has a stone fireplace big enough to hold this entire cabin.

Perhaps we could meet there some day, at dawn, when the blue clean lake is still and the geese rise suddenly, with wild cries, from the reeds on the far sh.o.r.e.

There is an enormous shed there, filled with logs surrounded with various mechanical aids to help move them. The guests had to have their show, and the lodge had laid in about a hundred such logs. This giant is aged and perfect like all of them, unrotted, requiring only cutting to twenty-four inch lengths and splitting. Only, I say, but I've devised interesting mechanical solutions to that problem. Wedges help.

As it burns I am reminded of the first log, which was in side, ready for the fireplace in the almost-deserted lodge. I pulled just-liberated Mildred balking up the stone steps, the hollow clomp of her hooves in the deserted lobby echoing from the peeled log rafters three stories above. Golden light poured in the many windows. I felt so alive as I tied the log, secured it to her harness, shouted Hyah! and she headed out the door. Behind the hotel at the log shed was the big winch they used to handle the logs, and I got it onto the wagon. Sure, my cabin is surrounded by forest, heavy, mature forest but it's more work to fell a tree than you might think. Besides, this log is always the same log, the first one.

When I burn it, I burn that lonely trip from Columbus on the empty train. I cried a lot on that trip. The vacant town was the last stop the robot train made when I fled crazed Columbus and I have an anniversary dinner there once a year, April 23rd, with G.E. lying at my feet as I look out on the azure lake, drink a priceless bottle of wine as candlelight winks off the etched pine on the wine gla.s.s, and wish for You to step off the train which is still in good working order. It arrives annually on that night (except for one irregu lar year when it was probably sitting on a siding repairing itself) at 9:28. You get my drift?

Of course I might have stayed there at the retro resort but the lodge was quite drafty since the windows were not self- healing and it was simply far too big.

The sunsets were glorious though and I wished for You to share them with. So after search ing the town I discovered Mildred lowing in a field, lonely but with plenty to eat. She had evidently pulled a sleigh for tour ists; I found it in a barn. Of course G.E. got in the way whe never possible and ran off with the first harness I found; she was still a floppy adolescent at the time. I was surprised that there was only one dead person in town, a young woman whose badge read Alice Stamhall who was slumped behind the check-in desk, dead, though somewhat preserved by the cold. I think she owned the Lodge. The license was in her name. It seems that all the tourists decided to hurry home to die or go insane and the locals just vanished.

The next morning our company of three left town. Mildred pulled a wagon heaped with supplies, tools, and the log. At dawn, the air smelled of lake and the pines were deep green, and their wind-stirred shadows danced on the damp dirt road. I heard small creatures rustle away over dry needles as we pa.s.sed.

We took the road north out of town--see, I am not stingy about clues--and moved along toward home, what has come to be home, as if this unlikely target was somehow imprinted in me and called me through deep forest and over outrageously high mountain pa.s.ses--hurry, hurry please! Sunsets are peach and gold, the sky behind sometimes brilliant green as Venus catches fire from the sun. There. The stove is hot now, I am satisfied, for the moment. I ice fish in winter, on Lake Pa.s.so, pike. I am well set up and here we can live quite well. I do.

I should warn you, however, I am well-armed and have sent a few yous packing, unfortunately . . . but they were not the True You, and I never killed any of them (except one) only sufficient ly frightened them. Believe me, You. Never.

Not a one. Well, only that one, who was very far from being a true you. I have a weapon which does not kill. Unless . . .

Ah, you are thinking . . . never mind. Trust me please. Yes.

Dear. You. As usual, as always, there is an Ancient Cul ture and how we long for it. We can't quite believe it gone, we try and linger in it, touch its dying fire. Ours was not as ancient nor as long as Chinese Dynasties; ours was a mere blip. But in intensity, in the flashing light of what-humans-can-know and really what else is there? we were glorious. I was and now you are packed tight with information, with true inforam, and therefore believe me believe me, You. My ancestors were peasants in Ireland and on the vast forested Indianed plains of Ohio, and our DNA is sharp, so believe me, You; I spring from the land. There is intensity here. So do make the attempt. I love you and I truly know what love is. It is not always just for people, you know. Sometimes it is just for Life.

Here it is.

I was terrified and exhilarated the instant my train car slipped from L.A.

through the dome membrane. A missionary for medicine, out into the fray, heading out from we who were so civilized, with our G.E., our Happiness, our pollen-held informa tion and pheromonal receptors with which to perfectly and preci sely transmit information. Sometimes the receptors are terribly hungry out here.

After all they could absorb most information much more precisely, and more quickly, than any other method. Still I don't consider returning, though something must remain of the domes. I think.

I was leaving L.A. to minister to the primitive folks we had left behind on our conversion to Flower-Cities. How magnanimous of me! I'd caught hints that they didn't want help, but ignored them like any good missionary. Outside the domes nanplagues long outlawed, remnants of the Information Wars, drifted about in clouds, sluiced down occasionally in rainfall. The plagues twisted unpredictably those who refused to come in from the rain and gather in the Flower-Cities, those who refused our admittedly limited inoculations to try and keep them half-safe, to protect the germ line just a bit. What fell was a real rain of stories as it were. Einstein could flower within you, Fermat's Last Theorem could unfold in breathtaking clarity, hurtling you straight down a swirling tunnel into the eye of the hurricane of Reality but without support you would, at the very least, forget to eat. And it could be worse. Plagues of violence had, of course, been much more popular than plagues of deep thought, but how was I to know that there was a plague of Bemused Midwestern ism abroad, wherein Thurber skewered Salvador Dali by contrasting Dali's upbringing with his own, where that stratum of interested yet detatched observation and acceptance and trust in some essen tial goodness of life would render the victim practically help less, though perpetually deeply amused?

As I say, it could have been worse.

The trip to Columbus took three times longer than scheduled. Only two trains a year took the eastern loop and we were exten sively briefed on disaster plans.

We were held up more than once by angry citizens. As we zipped across North America at 200 kph, I drank in golden prairies, red rock towers I had climbed in virtual, the ghost towns and ghost cities of our great and former nation. In the club car we dined on farm oysters and vat-grown beef. As we sipped wine from crystal which did not shiver, we exchanged rumors that the engineer had run over more than one protester; it was routine. What were they protesting, I won dered?

An explosion shook the train just out of Denver. I felt the tremor in my bunk because it was foreign to the so-smooth ride. I found later that they simply shed the last seven cars, which had been damaged (I heard that we were a hundred cars in all, and it was certainly a daunting journey to try and get from one end of the train to the other; after awhile the cars began to repeat themselves and it became boring) and swept on through the diamond-starred night. I lay on my back in my bunk and saw the stars undomed for the first time, with only a thin layer of gla.s.s between myself and the night sky. Perhaps you might understand why I would never want to try and find my way back to a dome, somewhere. Here the stars burn for me every night, and surpa.s.s any of the wonders civilization has to offer, for me at least.

The rails did not click they were all of a piece; grown; but my mind clicked, my heart clicked as if a new kind of blood surged through it. I was heading toward You and I felt it even then and I was young. But not as young as I am now.

Another log. I put on a glove to shield my hand as I shove it in among the other disintegrating logs; I step out onto the front porch for a bit and G.E. nudges my thigh wishing for a run. Silly dog I think no I am busy and she wags her tail and sits, lifts her nose and samples the air for You. Yes, even she knows You. I have told her about You in the pheromonal language she understands. And I have you indelibly lodged pheromonally in my DNA, one of those small benefits left from the Flower Cities which you distrusted and despised, more's the pity.

Frigid wind ruffles G.E.'s brown fur, and freezes what face I've left avail able after wrapping a scarf around it. The ridges are like waves, all around me, varying shades of black in the night, and the stars remind me of You. I love the view of s.p.a.ce here more than just about anything.

Are you coming? I'm afraid You will not, if I tell You more, but I must; the sheets infused me with dread Midwestern honesty, really the source of all my troubles let me tell you. No doubt you will be confused on wakening. I cross my arms over my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and cannot help remaining on the porch though my nose burns with cold, waiting for You possibly threading up the dirt road, my voice immediate in your mind I did tell you purple did I not, and give you the numbers? Please. At least for a night or two; don't turn back no matter what for it is dangerous once you are past Banff, the weather is uncertain, there are golden moun tain lions and grizzlies, stupendously enough, and you will need rest. I will not keep you if you do not want to stay. I am not kidding about the animals but you know as well as I that they are the least of your worries.

Injury and plague would do you in first, statistically speaking, if my antidotes did not take and it has been so very long I suspect that they did not. But there are other reasons you might not come, I suppose.

On the wooden porch I turn and look inside: see? A red plaid blanket flung over the couch, I can be concrete if you so insist, a teal-green chair the color of Pa.s.so Lake, two hundred feet below (a favored color at the Pointed Fir). Fire flickers orange and blue inside the arched gla.s.s window of the cast-iron stove, and I am cooking soybean soup upon it. Don't wrinkle your nose. It's delicious.

Cedar planks with staring golden eyes warm and complete me, almost. So easy to find, precision itself, if you know how to read so to speak. And I have the cure for all Plagues, and for many of the things which cause aging (they even seem to work on G.E. and Mildred, which surprises the heck out of me), which I will administer if you are kind, but it cannot make you kind, that is something only the coc.o.o.ns could do which is why I must be careful. Please make sure you are kind before you come all this way. One of you will feel kindness as a great change, a lifting of darkness. The other will feel unchanged. You knew that I had the cures long ago, so long ago, more's the pity. If things worked out, though, you have them now. I tried to administer them before I sheeted you, amidst the panic of the dam breaking, but as you may or may not remember, you destroyed whatever you could of them. Out of simple pique. One of you did, and you know which one of course. I'm not trying to start an argument here. I'm apologizing for not understanding the dynamics better. But I don't think that either of you understood them so why should I?

I have plenty of coffee, by the way, from the Pointed Fir Lodge. The supply will run out eventually, but Alice was ready for a blockbuster season.

And so the train reached Columbus. We stopped in Cincinnati dome and left fifteen cars but I did not get off the train; I had been warned against it as Cincinnati was on a slightly different system than L.A. which might kill me or at the very least make me sick. I heard rumors that their dome would not be there much longer; they had thought out an undomed system. Bravo, I said, not believing. But I had been immunized for undomed Columbus and Columbus only, though I had 6 clearance which meant protection for me--if it held, which was doubtful. The 6 guaranteed immuni zation wherever I went it was only a matter of verification and then the proper sheets supplied by local authorities. But that presupposed, of course, the existence of local authorities, and the definition of proper sheets had become by that time loose, had most likely drifted. I was out in the wilderness on my own and I relished that.

What a joke all that folderol was! For in Columbus--but why complain about what happened there? You gave me the maps which brought me here, beneath the diamond skies I bonded to once I got far enough north, have you seen the Pleiades? They are my favor ite the Seven Sisters my very Sisters though I know well enough they are just radio waves, glowing gas, the artifacts of our birth whose light only exists. The stars toward which You may travel, any one of you, if you wake and stretch in some other age, and if you are so misguided as to travel through s.p.a.ce instead of coming here, may well have not been born. Or may have died long ago.

How strange.

But then my heart is as well, to You, glowing and perhaps in an unborn wave, in radio wave fibrillation. Yet I selfishly hope you don't doubt that I am really here, let me tell you more, let me tell you how I bend in the brief spring and yank fledgling weeds from among the soybean rows. Lettuce and peas grow well here because it is so cool; I eat the lettuce before it gets to the house and the peas which survive my greed for sweet green things dry on large screens. The soybeans have furry green pods; I boil them whole then squeeze out the beans, which are utterly delicious. Someone else built this cabin, not I; his name was Peter Johnson and I often thank him. His virtual life is here though it does not interest me much; still I do not wipe him but leave him compressed out of respect. Sometimes he leaps from the walls to join Grandfather and we discuss the deep structure of s.p.a.cetime and forget that they are both dead as I stir the soup and tend the fire. Perhaps they are not. Dead that is, for what is death?

You must tell me sometime if you think you know, for you will have been the same place they are, more or less, except that I had the foresight to see that you had a body when you woke. They do come in handy. Grandfather and Peter often complain bitterly about being limited to this cabin.

Some summers have been far too cold, and I think I must leave my glorious paradise and cease waiting here for You, but there have never been two bad summers in a row and when I get depressed about the vegetables not growing I travel to little Flin Flon, quite cautiously, and the most life I detect with infrared are wild animals and not humans. I take what I need from the hotel's inexhaustible freeze-dried stores in a cart pulled by Mildred. Are You convinced? I am lonely, that is all. The rush of wind, which we never experienced in the dome, which makes me feel so alive, is more than enough to keep me here. This beauty is sharp. I ache to share it.

So. In Columbus the train door slid open and I was the only one debarking there, the only one properly initialized, the other pa.s.sengers braving on toward Toronto, NYC, D.C. I stepped off the train.

After my first astonished gasp I reeled beneath the blue sky, I danced, I laughed, then I rushed right across many empty tracks and here is concrete for you, here is actual: Mildred. I love my water buffalo and depend upon her, but not as much as I depended upon my original Mildred, who hurried after me, laughing. Are You her?

I will talk about You as if you are not listening, because the odds are very much against it. Someone else entirely might be listening, which is why I am a bit cryptic. Or, and this is most likely, no one.

Mildred's hair was blonde and waist-long, fine as corn silk. That day it was loose, and the wind caught it. Her eyes were wide, the curious shade of blue which I saw that summer matched the delphiniums in her mother's garden. She said she was Norwe gian, when I asked her, over coffee, in a small shop which disap pointed with no mozzarella but which fulfilled my expectations with cappuccino, which I still miss, the ceremony of it. Once in awhile I rummage through the huge kitchen of the Pointed Fir Lodge to try and find a stovetop steamer, but there is only a ma.s.sive ornate machine in the dining room, electric.

Mildred did not like Don her husband very much, by that time, though she did not quite realize it yet. It was he who prepared the wrong sheets for me, and it was Mildred who helped me into them. But it rather backfired.

"h.e.l.lo Dr. Chang," Don said, stumbling after me across the tracks. When he stopped he stared at me for a very long minute as if surprised. Well, apparently he was. He had expected a man, I'm not sure why nor why that would make a bit of difference to him. Communication was not terribly good in those times, though it was much better than now. He had very short red hair and was partly bald. On his long face was a small mustache which struck me as being rather unpleasant. His brown eyes were as closed as Mildred's were open. I tried to feel enthusiastic about my new colleague. Give him time, I thought.

"We have been waiting for you. Your train is very late," he said, after recovering from his staring fit, then laughed in a way which frightened me, but Mildred's calm blue eyes caught and settled me. Standing next to Don in a bright green thin parka, unzipped as it was March and warming, she reached out to shake hands with me after a brief odd hesitation during which I had the strange feeling that she was going to hug me, tight.

"We will have your trunks taken to our house, for now," said Mildred.

"Thank you," I said, unworried about all the nan inside, all of my research materials. They had been packed in antic.i.p.ation of any number of catastrophes, anything else would have been terribly irresponsible.

"Are you hungry?" asked Mildred.

I shook my head. "We just had breakfast," I said.

"Well, then," said Don, obviously pleased. "It's just a few blocks to the hospital, and you can have your sheets there."

"Yes, might as well get that over with," I said, excited. I wanted to know all about this new place, about my new patients; I wanted to find out how many of the local population had survived each plague wave, and how the survivors had been affected. That, and more, would all be in the sheets.

They walked very fast along the sidewalks. On the streets I saw all manner of vehicles--horses, horse-drawn carriages, and many bikes. I saw only one electric car, tiny and battered and yellow, and found later that it was owned by Tolliver Townsby, the man who also owned the Ice Cream Parlor. I was suddenly in another age, the one which I so craved.

"Where are all the people?" I asked, used to dome satura tion. On either side of me, Don and Mildred looked at each other. "Our population, including the county, is fifteen thou sand," said Mildred gently.

"Oh," I said. Much less than I had expected. The sheets toward which we were heading would prevent me from asking such silly questions.

We pa.s.sed many stores on the ancient main street, with huge plate gla.s.s windows, and a requisite amount of patrons. Thomp son's Feed and Seed, Elya's Organic Feast, The Snyder Cafe, it was a community of farmers, really, a completely self-sufficient organism which I now admire enormously. Above the storefronts rose tall, old-fashioned skysc.r.a.pers, completely empty. At the time I was stunned. Where are the Italians, I wondered, but was too shy to ask. Don and Mildred received nods and greetings from every person they pa.s.sed on that five block walk.

Then we arrived at the hospital where they kept the coc.o.o.ns and that's where I picked up Thurber, with his funny drawings of blunt angry women and cowed men with big noses and tiny eyes. His grandmother who believed that electricity leaked from outlets I could identify with in a way for when I actually saw the co c.o.o.ns after walking through a building which I thought could simply not exist any more in this day and age I stopped. Did a slight chill envelope my heart? It should have, but I don't really remember. I do remember trepidation.

The coc.o.o.ns were old, on the top floor of the nearly- deserted hospital, at the end of old dun-colored halls which had not been grown but built, probably fifty years before. The sociologists in L.A. had told me that I probably couldn't under stand the pride involved and at that point, staring at the co c.o.o.ns which Don and Mildred showed me with decorum and reverence, I realized the sociologists had been right and wondered what other good advice I might have ignored. Though the hospital smelled of disinfectant the walls were grubby and this room did not quietly gleam with nan cleaners as I was used to. It was lit with a bare bulb and pipes mazed the ceiling with an old fire- protection system. The coc.o.o.ns themselves filled me with a strange poignancy, for at the instant I saw them I realized how far in time I actually was from L.A. There were four. They looked like one of the original models, and probably the city had purchased them during the initial surge of faith, when it was thought that nan could cure everything. The style was unmistak able, the curve of the coc.o.o.ns, the oldstyle computers which regulated them visible, small crystals set on shelves above, connected to the coc.o.o.ns with cables. An antiquer's delight, the kind of thing you see campily displayed in lofts, or even mu seums. I wondered what long-abandoned programming might lurk within those crystals. I should have wondered harder. As for the hospital itself, it simply staggered me with its age.

One of the things I had learned was how much the natives would dislike me.

Though I looked at Don and wondered, I had been carefully programmed to be nonjudgemental about that. Well, that part worked a bit too well, I must say.

The natives had good reasons for rejection. Nan had laid waste to most of the country through all sorts of vectors.

"Are you sure . . . ?" I asked and Don looked at me in an exasperated fashion with veed eyebrows dark and s.h.a.ggy, Mildred behind him a bit more anxious. "Our population is--different from that of L.A., Dr. Chang," he said, still scowling.

"I would be the first to acknowledge how rural we truly are, how backward. But I personally ran the checks . . . "

"Fine, fine," I said, too hastily, please remember and stop laughing at my idiocy that I had never been out of the city and knew nothing, directly. Inforam does not come into play until your hands, as it were, touch. To put it simply, you may not even know that you are filled with the works of Bach, until you sit down in front of an organ and then it all floods out, per fect. No, I knew nothing of Thurber, the Great Plains, or Don's particular fears. I didn't even know how to suspect or infer them, or that I ought to. Mildred was married to Don and did, but did not suspect him of perfidy; I was to learn that was not an emotional possibility for her. And his action sprang from pride, from anger at having some hotshot newdoc sent out with all that authority, jurisdiction, though I was ten years younger than he was, and from fear that I knew a lot more than he did, which was absolutely true. If I had had some sort of background in schlepping delicately among the egos of those who had more--or less--at stake than the mere salvation of humankind, I might have been more cautious.

Don left, and Mildred made a few adjustments to the crys tals, silent with a technician's concentration. She smiled and squeezed my shoulder, then I was alone in the warm dry room and I stripped off my skinsuit and stepped into the coc.o.o.n. I lay down and felt the familiar clasp as it molded itself around me and was satisfied via the fuzzy logic code which flashed within my retina that this coc.o.o.n, Don's sheets, and my internalized system were compatible. It required a standard suppressant of various pre-set biochemical barriers, and I complied.

The slight blip of yellow light gave me to know that though something was minutely off, parity was very close, close enough to function, and I put it down to lack of sophistication on the part of the coc.o.o.n. Ha!

The next day I opened my eyes enormously changed, in a very good humor. I stared at the pipes above me and knew that one day in Columbus around 1910 or so, the erroneous rumor that the dam had burst spread, and saw Thurber's swift line drawings of stubby rounded Columbus citizens hoofing it out of the city in droves. I knew that his family had an Airedale named Matt who bit a lot of people. That story really made me howl, no pun intended, for I'd always longed to have a dog (and now I have you, wonderful G.E. and very strong jaws you have too! and one or two yous--the wrong ones--may have been bitten by them, far down the road where I couldn't see). All those delicious Thurber stories, which so lovingly described Columbus, hovered in my mind, in my vision, and I began to laugh.

Just the knowledge that I was here, in Columbus, was enough to bring Thurber out of inforam. My laughter echoed through the large empty room, bounced off the pipes. My mission, so sharp when I left L.A. (you must understand I was second in my cla.s.s and they were extremely annoyed that I chose to leave; they had other uses in mind for me) was faint and hazy in my mind, like an almost-forgotten dream, when I opened my eyes. But not entirely forgotten. No, not entirely.

And so I rolled out of the coc.o.o.n after twenty-four hours, alone. Light came in through a high frosted window and I felt at home in this new place and thanked the sheets, for they had historied me into everything. I knew the past of the region and the medical history of all Don and Mildred's patients as well as that of their parents and grandparents. I knew how to grow corn on the flood plain in the spring. If an Iroquois had shown up, by G.o.d, I would have been able to speak her native language with her, though without that stimulus I never would or could utter a word of it.

I took a shower in the small dank concrete-floored stall. There were at least fifty lockers there so I surmised that there had been a time when the coc.o.o.ns had heavy use. I dried myself, pulled on my skinsuit, and covered it with the native clothing someone had thoughtfully left--overalls. I wear trousers now which do not cling, and plaid shirts from the broken nan ski shop in Flin Flon, which was fortunately well-stocked before the fluid dried up after the townsfolk fled. Ah, what did I know of the fears of the people who lived outside the domes? Sure I used to be an MD once but what did I know? I could cure fear with the proper pheromones but you had to have the receptors first, and I had to have diagnostic equipment, and the pher-pak. Such is life. I can set broken bones now, I couldn't have then. I only knew how to use a computer, that's all, thought I could block the plague but it took me as easily as anyone. Only much more brief ly. It left me with respect.

And I like living here, save for the loneliness. It's all for the best and that optimism comes direct from those Columbus sheets. Because of them I am able to be amused though not at the vagaries of others for there aren't any others here.

I am just generally amused, and I'm always ready to be further amused, though not at your expense of course. You would find me pretty amusing too I am sure.

You?

I am really here, really, concrete, flesh. Believe it. If You are kind, we could have children; I am fully functional. Kindness is not really programmable, unfortunately; it's largely an environmental thing. Don was not kind because he thought it wouldn't help him get results, but people who are kind are so under almost all circ.u.mstances, save for certain extremes when they may get snappish and that's always understandable when it happens. But if you have turned out kind, children would be interesting. Now if that doesn't tempt you you just aren't the one I'm looking for. There's a fifty percent chance they would have receptors; I don't know whether that sounds good or bad to you, that germ line stuff. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. I'm ever so glad I have mine it makes me more versatile. I am not so lonely as sometimes the fitful satellite gives me Grand dad, I told you that, and we can talk. Other than that I have delusions of recreating civilization, only better and in a foolproof way, so now you know that I am insane and incapable of learning from history. So what? I'm human. If you are kind, you will like that. Don't come if you don't. I am armed, I tell you.

I fell in love with Mildred, and if you are Mildred I don't know what you will think about that, though I did not sleep with her. With You. Oh, I'm getting confused now. I blush. Well, actually, I barely thought of it, though later I did, and plenty, after I'd shrugged off her touch and made her cry. I am sorry about that it is my one regret. All the others are for myself only and therefore silly as errant neutrinos, as meaningless, yet as powerful in the disruption of communications. Her feelings were real and she needed me. Maybe just once. Who else was there, for her? Mildred? You would know why I named my most valuable ally after you. You would like that. I know you. After a year of life with you, my dear, I know you. Apparently that was the most important year of my life. And though I look young, and though I think I could have children, I am old. Old and very, very amused. How good it would be to have company. Especially yours.

Perhaps it was the Ohio sheets which made Mildred and I so close. Without them it all might have been so foreign to me that I would have run screaming back to smooth surfaces, information at a touch.

She and Don lived in her mother's house. It was a three- story white frame house with tilting oak floors. The foundation was surrounded by rose bushes which had been mature when Mildred was a child; she tended them with great care and they yielded overblown blossoms which filled the house with color and fra grance from spring to fall. She gave me th.o.r.n.y bouquets for my own little room on 5th Street, a room with high ceilings and a steam-heat vent, utterly unlike anything in the dome.

The three of us visited one another's houses in the evenings and cooked for one another and had the same vision, I thought, combating the plague. Except that we had endless arguments about the best way to do it. Don found it hard to trust inoculation. This was not entirely irrational on his part, but it was the best stopgap we had and better than nothing. Isolation, what they were trying in Columbus, was simply impossible. He tolerated me because he knew he had to.

Sometimes I found him staring at me with an unreadable expression after a particularly fierce ex change. I did not find this pleasant. But I was trying to forge some connection with him, because he was my link to his patients. Perhaps he misunderstood my attempts.