Interface, p.1
Interface, page 1
INTERFACE
by A. A. Attanasio
Morning sunlight running invisibly through the long, slender glass windows gives the laboratory a surreal attitude. The walls are white, circular, and indifferent. And the remote ceiling is a luminescent circle with an eleven-meter diameter. The cylindrical room itself is a menagerie of electrical equipment describing the circumference of an amphitheater recessed in the center of the room. In the amphitheater is a mechanized chair of graying leather before a television screen. The floor is well waxed.
Dr. Michel Ibu advances several paces into the laboratory and looks across the amphitheater at a small bank of data collaters, mute in the sunlight. Their metallic faces, catching the sun, wear several small rainbows.
Dr. Ibu walks around a crowd of oxygen tanks and stands at the edge of the amphitheater. He is lanky and has a slight stoop. His face would be virtually flat except for high, prominent cheekbones laced with fine wrinkles in the black skin. His temples are gray.
“Dr. Reed?” he calls tentatively.
“Be with you in a minute,” a distracted female voice answers.
Dr. Ibu folds his arms and grins.
So this is how we meet, he thinks.
A slender, dark-haired woman in a light-blue lab smock emerges from behind a portable canvas partition that has a large, assertive red ! printed on it. She is tall, and her hair is loose, falling about her shoulders.
“Yes?” she asks.
“Dr. Reed, I’m Michel Ibu from the marine labs.”
She raises her eyebrows in a gesture of surprise. “So you’re the neurophysiologist-biophysicist I’ve been warned about,” she says without a smile.
“I’ve been tracking you down for two weeks.” Ibu grins. “It seems you’re kept quite busy here.”
“Frankly, Dr. Ibu, I’ve just been trying to avoid you.”
He cracks a disconcerted smile. “Why?”
“I’m not interested in working with terminal patients.”
“How do you know I’m going to ask you to?”
“Are you going to be coy?”
“Who told you about the project?”
“I received your first invitation to work on the project, and then I went to Comptrol, and I looked into it myself. I’m just not interested in working on it.”
“But do you understand what it’s about?”
“I don’t understand why you have to use a terminal patient.”
“Look, Dr. Reed, have you had breakfast yet?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’d like to talk with you—to familiarize you with the project.”
“I’m listening.”
“Well, why don’t you let me take you down to the marine labs so I can show you what we’re doing?”
“I haven’t got the time, Dr. Ibu.”
“Okay,” he says, exasperated, running one hand over his face. “In a nutshell, I’m on the verge of interspecies communication. I’m working with Lenny, a dolphin, and Heath Underhill, an eighteen-year-old terminal.”
“Underhill? Do you mean he’s from Underhill Clone?”
“Yes. But it would be more accurate to say that he’s a reject from Underhill Clone. He’s a ‘cdd’—the defect is on an independent geriatric allele. In a short while, two or three years, he’ll start decomposing. But right now he’s in perfect health and with an IQ that easily categorizes him as a genius. He was purchased for just those reasons.
“Underhill Clone sent me Heath when he was six months old. As a ‘cdd’ he would have been euthed immediately. But we kept him here, and when he turned seven, we introduced him to Lenny. They’ve grown up together; their psyches have been interacting for most of their lives. They have a good, healthy relationship.”
“You talk as if they’re equals.”
“If anything, Lenny is Heath’s superior. The dolphin has a cerebral cortex the size of a human’s. But the parietal area, the silent zone linked to abstract thinking, is almost twice as large. When I began to study dolphin sounds, I found they had an immensely more complex communication system than we do. This is what led me to question whether we might establish interspecies communication. Our biggest problem right now is structural. The dolphin language is sonic, but it’s waterborne and is therefore ten times faster than ours. We just think too slowly to talk with a dolphin. But that’s where you come in.”
“And how’s that?”
“Your field is psychobiology. Your specialty is neurology. And your research project for the past six years, since you first came to the clinic, has been autonomous visceral control. I know that you’ve taught subjects how to control their heartbeat, blood pressure, even certain glandular excretions. What I’d like is for you to teach Heath much of the same, only more intensively.”
“But what has that to do with talking dolphins?”
“Dr. Madoc, the psychophysicist here, has synthesized a hallucinogen that, in some way I’m not familiar with, mobilizes awareness. It distorts temporal perception so radically that, for any practical purposes, time for the user no longer exists. Most remarkably, it’s possible when using this drug to shift consciousness to any part of the body. There’s one drawback: even the smallest trace quantities of this drug are enough to dislocate consciousness for hours. And he’s found, working with rats, and in the six volunteer cases he’s had, that it’s impossible to survive without extensive conscious visceral control. Many of the primitive parts of the brain are shut down by the drug, and normally independent functions simply stop. Only one of the six volunteers survived.”
“I still don’t see where the talking dolphins come in.”
“It’s the mutual belief of Dr. Madoc and myself that within the expanded state of awareness of this drug, it will be possible to ‘race up the mind,’ so to speak, to the faster rate of communication that the dolphin employs. With the proper precontact training, most of which in Heath’s case is unnecessary, considering the simpatico between him and Lenny as it is, we may establish the first interspecies communication; we may be exposed to a culture whose structure is totally alien to us.”
Dr. Reed deliberates for a brief moment. Presently she says, “There are two others in this department who have been working on visceral control—Kapowitz and Jennings.”
“Yes, but only you have had extensive experience with humans. Heath may be synthetic, but he’s still human, and you’re the most qualified to deal with him.”
“All right,” she says, shrugging. “I have to admit you’ve interested me. When do we begin?”
* * * *
“You may begin whenever you’re ready,” she says, securing the headrest. “Take it from sixty-four to one hundred and ten.”
Dr. Reed walks to the front of the amphitheater and steps behind a console, from where she can monitor the heartbeat of the young man in the mechanized chair and still observe him. The subject’s face is calm, and his eyes are fixed on the TV screen in front and slightly above him.
Several minutes of inactivity pass, and then a small red light on the face of the screen blimps once, indicating an alteration in the heartbeat of the young man.
Focus on that, Dr. Reed thinks.
Another red light blimps. A moment passes, and then there is another flash. And then another. The TV screen registers an acceleration of heartbeat by displaying a cardiograph with more frequent spikes. With deliberation, the rate climbs to one hundred and ten beats per minute.
“Okay, now bring it down to fifty,” Dr. Reed orders.
Immediately another red light flashes on the screen. This occurs once more before the spikes on the cardiograph become more separated, spacing out to fifty beats per minute.
“Fine,” she says. “Now maintain that rate, and increase your blood pressure. Take it to one-twenty over ninety.”
Another graph flicks onto the TV screen, showing his relative blood pressure. Thirty seconds pass before the graph indicates an increase in the pressure. It increases steadily, leveling off at the assigned pressure.
“Very good,” Dr. Reed says, recording the time intervals on a clipboard.
“He’s progressing well, I take it,” a gravel voice says at her side. It’s Dr. Ibu.
“Hold it there for another minute,” she directs, and then turns her attention to Ibu. “Yes, his will is remarkably well integrated. He’s a good subject to work with.”
“I’m glad to hear that you’re satisfied,” Ibu says. “Would you say, then, that he’s ready?”
“Ready for what? Short-term suspension of visceral control—yes. Prolonged suspension—no.”
“You’ve been working with him for six weeks. How much longer before he can master his visceral responses?”
“Master them for what period of time?”
“Indefinitely.”
Dr. Reed turns back to the experiment. “That’s it for now, Heath.” She looks at Ibu. “I’ll need another two weeks, at least.”
Ibu’s mouth slips open. “Two weeks! My dear, do you realize how impatient I am?”
“I’m doing as thorough a job as I can, as quickly as I can, doctor,” she says, studying her console and recording some final data. “You yourself pointed out that if he doesn’t master this, his life may be forsaken. Besides, if you didn’t hog all of his time, this process would have been over long ago.”
“I’m not hogging his time. It’s Lenny. But that’s necessary, too. Their relationship is important.”
She shrugs.
“I just think you’re jealous of Lenny,” Ibu says mock seriously.
Dr.
“Hello, Michel,” Heath says, approaching them. He is of average height, perhaps a trifle smaller. His complexion is light and smoothly clear, enhancing his pleasing features—prominent jaw and soft gray eyes. His physique is ideal.
“Hello, Heath,” Ibu responds with a smile. “Elisabeth tells me that she’s very satisfied with you.”
Heath grins and makes a sarcastic gesture.
“Listen, you,” Elisabeth says with feigned anger, “keep that up, and tomorrow you’ll get a real workout in the chair. As for you”—she glares at Ibu—”why don’t you go tell it to your fish ... or ... or mammal, or whatever it is.”
Ibu laughs his staccato laugh, indicating his own satisfaction. “I’m going to do that right now,” he says, putting his arm around Heath’s shoulders. “It’s just about time for Lenny’s session.”
Heath faces Elisabeth. “Why don’t you come with us?” he asks.
“I don’t think I can afford the time now,” she says. “I’ve got all of today’s data to correlate, still.”
“You can do that tonight,” Heath says. “Besides, I’m tired of showing off in front of Michel and his cronies. It’d be more satisfying for me if you were there.”
Ibu chuckles. “What can you say to that?”
“I’m coming,” she says. The young man’s abruptness makes her nervous.
It is a long, cool walk through the air-conditioned halls of the clinic from the neurology labs to the marine labs. Occasional artistic blurbs of multicolored geometric designs printed on walls and doors relieve some of the monotony of the otherwise bland white corridors.
The marine labs take up the entire west face of the complex of buildings that make up the clinic. It faces the sea.
The particular lab that they enter is more like an enormous gymnasium. The ceiling is several stories high, and many naked steel beams cross each other up there. On the tile floor of the lab, besides a series of bleachers and several large water-purifying units, there is a red stripe that outlines a hundred-meter pool. Ibu leads up to the demarkation and finds a metal ring that opens a door in the tile floor. Ibu and Elisabeth descend into an observation room that is a chamber whose one wall is a glass side to the pool.
The pool is connected to a large underwater tunnel that leads directly to the sea. It is rarely closed off, and all manner of sea life find their way. Dr. Ibu learned long ago that to confine a dolphin against his will was futile. They just won’t cooperate. He found that the creatures responded better to his experimentation when they were treated warmly and consistently and were allowed to come and go as they pleased.
Elisabeth touches her fingertips to the glass. The water is pellucid enough to see the surface clearly. Up there Heath is stripping.
“It’ll be a few moments before Lenny gets here,” Ibu says, looking at his watch.
“Does he always come on time?”
“Always.”
The sound of someone singing in a falsetto seeps through the walls from unseen corridors. It is a happy tune.
“Tell me, Michel,” Elisabeth says, studying her reflection in the glass (she considers herself good-looking; most men would agree), “is there any possibility of . . .”
There is a blurred, elusive movement in front of her. Focusing her eyes, she sees a dolphin, slightly larger than a man, its gray form sleek. It darts longitudinally across her field of vision.
“Punctual, indeed,” Ibu says, his flat, black face bright with pride. He returns his attention to Elisabeth. “Excuse me. What was it you were going to ask?”
She had meant to ask about Heath, and if there were any chance of his life being prolonged. She knows it is hopeless and thinks it better not to give Ibu any more reason to suspect that she is infatuated with Heath.
“My answer is out there,” she says, gesturing toward the water. “I was going to ask if Lenny was really coming or not.”
A silvery-blue congeries of bubbles thrusts itself soundlessly before the glass wall, resolving itself into a human form that gracefully arcs back up toward the surface, completing a perfect parabolic sweep.
Heath returns immediately, but this time he is clinging to Lenny’s back, trailing his legs behind him. The duo complete several spirals and then surface for air.
“They’ll play for a couple of hours,” Ibu says.
In the pool, Heath is completing the transition between two worlds. He lets the above world slip away, shrugging off its gravity. The below world, the world of muted colors and buoyant substance, adopts him—not a foster world, though, nor less genuine, but more congenial than above, more real.
He skims along the surface of the pool, Lenny keeping time beside him, his bottle nose and permanent smile above water. Then, with a stretch of stroke, Heath picks up the pace, and with dazed and jumping eyeballs he looks once more above, then dives below. He reaches the bottom, touches it with hands and knees, and then unforms and sprawls shapeless as a dead man, hanging limply in suspension.
Lenny slips under him and pushes him.
They latch together and streak up. The green edges of the pool whirl, dizzy with the eruption of their surfacing, and the pumping heart shakes the brilliance from the electric lights.
Heath loops his arms around Lenny again, and they somersault below, easing into a slow sweep of the bottom.
Heath feels his body become exhilarated with the smooth effort. His brain is hurled from platitude, the forced lungs cry for meager air, organs of sense are strained beyond their common catch, and the world and tortured body pulse into chaos. Together they unmake old realms.
Having to halt, they drift to the surface. Heath gasps for breath and hears the blood grow soft and usual. Seeing the green pool’s edge and his pile of clothing, he feels stale threats come up abreast and reassert their normalcy, before whose arrogance he straightens, fills his lungs, begins to dive.
“Yes, they’ll play for hours together,” Ibu says, his eyes glazed over.
* * * *
Dr. Corin Madoc, sitting in his cramped office with the glass panel that looks out into his cramped lab, sees Elisabeth Reed as soon as she enters the lab. She walks toward his office with a straight-backed, slow step that he is very fond of in her. He doesn’t know her very well—only by word of mouth and his own sexual curiosity—but he has admired her for a long time, since his wife died (that long? really?).
Having seen him staring at her, she does not bother to knock. He likes that, too.
“Dr. Madoc, I’m Dr. Reed,” she announces congenially.
“Come in and sit down, if you wish,” Dr. Madoc offers in a voice with a trace of Australian accent. “I’d ask you to make yourself comfortable, but the room’s too small for that.”
