Out of the Waste Land

Illustration by Mark Salwowski

The desert Sun was so bright that it almost blinded Margaret as she stepped out of the van. She blinked furiously for a moment and wished she could wear sunglasses again. Then she remembered her options. A sensor built into her silvery helmet’s rim measured her eye movements and fed the data into her computer, allowing her to click on the optical icon and drag the cursor across the Sun symbol. The eyeplate adjusted itself and began to reflect away some of the Mojave sunlight.

Once her eyes had recovered from the glare, Margaret clicked on her movement icons and looked around. Her head turned with none of the jerkiness she had known during her first weeks of therapy, and she got a clear, steady look at her surroundings. The van had stopped at a gas station in a small desert town—a few cinderblock houses with chicken coops and dish antennas in their sunbaked yards, a diner, and a convenience store. She had seen more impressive ghost towns. Dead, weed-choked ground stretched away from the town in all directions, while barren, eroded hills rose up a few miles to the east and north. The brown and tan colors of the land looked baked and dry.

The van’s driver seemed to read her mind; she realized he must have made this trip dozens of times. “It’s just a jumping-off point,” he told Margaret. He pointed to the badlands north of the town. “The big city is out that way.”

Margaret keyed in her speech icons. A symbolic keyboard appeared in the heads-up display of her eyeplate. Deftly, she looked at the translucent letters and icons, building up her answer one letter at a time: H, O, W, speak, F, A, R, speak. Her helmet’s computer relayed the commands to what was left of her neural system, and her lungs, larynx, and mouth worked. “How far,” she asked. Her voice was flat; intonations were too complex for the computer to handle.

“Fifty, sixty miles,” the driver said. “It depends on what path Ringo likes.”

The station attendant came out of the service bay. He was a teenage boy in a greasy Texaco shirt. He didn’t look at Margaret, which annoyed her. He must have seen this van and its driver often enough to know that the passengers were rehab patients from the UCLA Medical Center. That made her something less than a woman in his eyes. “Fill it?” he asked the driver.

“Yeah, and check the oil,” the driver said. He looked around impatiently as the boy uncapped the gas tank. “Where’s Ringo?”

“It’s Geisler to you, scumbag,” a man’s loud voice said. He walked out of the service bay and Margaret looked him over: big without being fat, scruffy beard and long graying hair tied in a ponytail, blue jeans and a black Harley Davidson shirt. He wore several silver rings on each finger, and Margaret saw his fingers wiggle with each step he took. A paraplegic, she guessed, still using the old-style limb stimulators instead of implants. “Anyone calling me ‘Ringo’ better have a widow named Yoko.”

The driver ignored his complaint. “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

“ ‘Ready,’ hell,” Geisler said. He patted his waist, and Margaret saw the bulge of a battery belt. “Eveready, man.”

“Well, good,” the driver said, “ ’cause I have to be back in Westwood before—”

“Tough,” Geisler told him. He turned to Margaret and stuck out his hand. “Tom Geisler. I’ll be your guide.”

Margaret clicked on her dexterity icons and placed the palm of her hand against his, then switched back to her speech icons. “Margaret Danes,” she said as they shook hands.

“Good to meet ya, Maggie,” Geisler said. “You ready?”

Now there’s a loaded question, she thought; she still wasn’t sure what to expect from what the therapists had told her would be a “wilderness survival experience.” Hiking through the California desert in the middle of June hadn’t struck her as a good idea, but she hadn’t wanted to argue with her therapists; she had been wrong about too many things to trust her judgment anymore, a thought she quickly dismissed. “My pack is in the van,” she said.

“Let’s see what you got before we saddle up.” Geisler went to the van’s rear hatch and opened it. Margaret followed him and saw him scowl at her orange backpack. “Jesus,” he grumbled as he opened it and started pulling out survival supplies. He tossed most of them aside: Halazone tablets, a large first-aid kit, a tube tent, instruction manuals, and other odds and ends she couldn’t identify. “Hey, weenie!” he shouted at the driver.

“Don’t you people ever learn?”

The driver joined them. “What’s your problem, Geisler?”

“It ain’t my problem,” he said, “it’s yours. You idiots loaded her up like a pack mule. When was the last time you brought me somebody who could carry sixty pounds of crap?” Geisler turned to Margaret and looked her over. “Nothin’ personal, but there’s no way you can carry all that junk.”

“I know,” she said. Exercise—endless hours on treadmills and machines, her body working in response to preprogrammed instructions from her helmet—had restored some of the muscle and endurance she’d lost during her illness, but she knew she still looked frail. “What do I need?”

“Not much,” Geisler said, as the driver wandered off. He finished emptying the pack, then retrieved a few items. He spoke as he crammed them into the pack. “Your sleeping bag. Suntan lotion. Toothbrush. Toilet paper. Salt tablets. What’s this?” he added, picking up something that looked like a roll of blue metal foil. A wire dangled from one end of the roll.

“Solar battery recharger,” Margaret said. “I need it. And the cleaning fluid. For my eyeplate.”

“OK.” Geisler zipped up the pack and handed it to Margaret. Quickly, she clicked on her dexterity icons and maneuvered her hands to take the pack. Her fingers wrapped around a shoulder strap, and she threaded her free arm through its loop. Last night she had spent a half-hour practicing the maneuver of putting on her backpack. The practice helped, and she was able to get the load in place and snugged down with little difficulty. Her neural prosthetics told her that the pack was much lighter than it had been last night, and when she took a few experimental steps she found it easier to move. Her body seemed to shift around less, too; with the lighter load on her back, the helmet’s sensors had less trouble maintaining her balance as it automatically worked certain leg muscles to keep her upright.

The attendant had washed the van’s windows, and as Margaret turned around she saw herself reflected in a window. The helmet covered her head, protecting the computer and the thousands of hair-fine electrodes implanted throughout her brain, and holding the display’s glass plate in front of her eyes. The smooth metal dome only emphasized the hollowness of her cheeks, reminding her of what she’d gone through. Illness, surgery, therapy, Lydia’s death—

She couldn’t think about that. She forgot about it. Geisler had walked away, going behind the gas station. Margaret went after him, and found him standing next to an old black motorcycle. He stood with his legs apart to keep himself braced as he dug into its saddle bags. He slung a bedroll and a rucksack over his shoulders, then buckled a web belt with a pair of canteens and a small first-aid kit around his waist. “You ready to roll, Maggie?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Guess again.” He pulled another pair of canteens from his saddlebags and handed them to her. “Last thing you want to do is walk into the desert without water,” he said, as she fumbled with the belt that held the canteens. “You can get dehydrated in no time. Sunstroke, too. Where’s your hat?”

Margaret buckled the belt in place, then switched to her speech icons. “I don’t need a hat,” she said. “The helmet is designed to reflect heat. It’s been tested.”

“Yeah?” Geisler shrugged. She found herself envying the easy naturalness of that gesture. Body language was one of the many things she had lost: the simple ability to express feelings through natural changes in posture. “Well, I’ve worn helmets in hotter places than this, and I didn’t fry my brain too bad. Let’s go.” He turned and started walking.

“How far?” Margaret asked.

He shrugged again. “Ten, twelve miles today. C’mon.”

Margaret hesitated as Geisler kept walking. The ground beyond the gas station looked reasonably flat, but it was choked with weeds and dried-out desert growths, and there were angular rocks everywhere. She clicked on the autowalk icon, but before she could set the cursor to draw out a projected path the computer flashed a message on her display in indignant red letters: Terrain too rough. Advice: [1] Choose smoother terrain. [2] Use manual guidance.

She wondered what idiot had decided to send her out on ground as rough as this. For a moment she thought about getting back in the van and returning to Los Angeles—except—damn it, that would mean admitting she couldn’t handle this. Admitting she was a cripple, and having to listen to more feel good talk from the therapists. No way, she told herself, no way in hell.

And this place looked like a good approximation of hell. One more mistake, she thought in disgust. Another mistake in a lifetime of mistakes. Wrong husband, wrong doctor, wrong everything. It had all brought her here, leaving her unable to do anything for herself except move her eyes and blink. A basket case, reanimated by a computer and moving like a marionette in a land as dead and barren as her life.

She clicked on her movement icons, identified a stretch of dirt ten feet long that looked fairly smooth, and placed the cursor at the end of the stretch. The computer took control and obediently moved her legs, left, right, left, walking her over to the spot she had marked. Another icon let her step over a large rock, and then she was able to cross a dozen clear and level feet of desert ground before she had to stop to evade a dead clump of brown, shrub-sized weeds. She turned a bit to the left and made it across two yards of clear ground before hitting another obstacle.

Geisler had walked on a hundred yards ahead of her, before he stopped to watch her zig-zag her way across the ground. “Somethin’ wrong?” he called to her. Then, after a long silence: “Well?”

Margaret stopped, looked at him and switched to her speech icons. She raised her vocal volume to make sure he heard her. “Nothing is wrong. I can’t move any fwster.”

Geisler looked blank. “ ‘F’wister’?”

“Faster,” she said in irritation. Every time she misspelled a word the damned computer made her mouth generate some idiot-sounding noise. It didn’t help that the machine got confused over some of the English language’s more idiosyncratic rules. P’seechowtherapy. K’nuckless. Wurist. Every night (which the computer had originally pronounced as “ni-gut”) she had to spend time programming in correct pronunciations.

In her first hour after leaving the desert town Margaret had barely walked one mile. When she looked back she saw the van was still there, parked in front of the diner. Too late to turn back, she thought wryly; by the time she could thread her way back the driver would have finished his meal and left town. Of course, she had a cellular modem built into her helmet, so she could call for a ride—no, forget it.

Geisler stopped at the end of the first hour, took a drink from one of his canteens, then held it out to her. “Don’t drink too much right now,” he cautioned her. “There’s a supply cache about ten miles from here, and what we’re carrying has to last until we get there.”

Margaret swallowed some water, then lowered the canteen. She decided against trying to screw the cap back in place; she had practiced that maneuver, but she wasn’t very good at it and didn’t want to risk spilling any water. She handed the canteen to Geisler and switched on her speech icons. “I’m walking faster now,” she said.

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said, as he capped the canteen and hung it on his belt. “The ground gets sorta smoother in another mile or so. There’s a dirtbike trail along the foot of the hills. It’ll go straight to the number one cache.”

“That sounds better.”

“Yeah, well, it’s gonna get a lot hotter before it gets any cooler.” Geisler took off his hat and wiped at his forehead, then looked her over. “You look OK so far, so I guess you’ll make it. One thing, though. I guess you can’t walk and talk at the same time?”

“Right.” She thought about explaining how she had to switch between her different control icons, then decided against it. “Maybe I’m qualified to go into politics.”

Geisler laughed and put his hat back on. “Let’s get going.”

The trail was a set of ruts which ran along the foot of the dusty hills. It was broken by gullies and boulders which had tumbled down the craggy slopes. The trail was not much smoother than the desert floor had been, but Margaret was learning how to walk on it with reasonable speed.

Late in the evening they found a V-shaped pile of stones at the mouth of a ravine, and Geisler swore at it in disgust. “They should know better,” he complained to Maggie, as he led her up the ravine. “Hell’s bells, I told them better.”

Margaret followed him in silence. Whatever the problem was, she knew he would tell her sooner or later. He had kept up a fairly steady monologue throughout the day, filling her in on desert lore and history. He had also asked after her health from time to time, saw to it that she took enough water and salt tablets to make up for her sweat losses, and made sure she kept her exposed face and arms slathered with sunscreen.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred,” Geisler grumbled, his fingers wiggling methodically as he counted off his paces. He stopped and looked around the ravine. “Yeah, there it is, lucky us.” He walked up to a boulder, where a steel drum painted Dayglo orange sat in its shadow. He pulled off its lid, looked inside, and pulled out something. “Take this and head back to the trail. No way are we camping here.”

Margaret took the burlap bag he handed her and walked back to the ravine’s mouth. He followed her a few minutes later. He had tied a rope to the drum’s handle, and looped the rope’s end around his shoulders like a harness. His fingers worked as he operated his leg’s control rings. “Goddamn brainless wonders,” he panted. “Never think about… how I’m supposed… to walk and carry crap… same goddam time.”

“Let me help,” Margaret said.

“You’ll goddamn have to help, Maggie,” Geisler said. He pointed to the hillside, where a barely-visible trail ran up to a smooth ledge under a rock face. “That’s our campsite, and there’s no way I can carry this stuff up there.”

“They may have had that in mind,” Margaret said.

“What, to make you do somethin’ therapeutic?” Geisler sat down and wiped sweat from his face. “Figures. OK, get therapeutic. I’m too old for this crap.”

Margaret took the bag he had given her before and carried it uphill to the ledge. The path wasn’t too bad, she noted, and when she clicked on the autowalk icon the computer was able to take her uphill without asking for her guidance. That came as a welcome change of pace. After having to think about almost every step she took for the past dozen miles, Margaret was glad to let the computer do some work.

She needed a half-dozen trips to remove all the supplies from the drum and carry them to the ledge. Geisler started cooking dinner while she worked, and he had the camping rations ready by the time she had finished. “Bet you’ve worked up an appetite,” Geisler said, as he handed her a Styrofoam cup of stew.

“I don’t know,” she said, after she had sat down. She felt awkward about making conversation; using her icons made it impossible to maintain eye contact as she talked. “My implants only give me surface sensations. Touch, pressure, temperature. I can’t tell if I’m hungry.”

“Yeah? Well, you’d better eat like you’re hungry. Tomorrow’s going to be worse, count on it.” There had been an envelope in the drum. He took a bite of beef jerky, then chewed on it as he opened the envelope and looked at the map it contained. “Great. Cache number two is only eight miles from here, and when it’s that close you can bet it means we have to do something stupid to reach it. Those idiots in Westwood love that scavenger-hunt stuff.” He stuffed the map into his pants pocket. “I just had to get mixed up with this therapy business.”

Margaret stopped eating long enough to ask a question. “Why?”

“Money,” Geisler said. “You know how much it takes to keep a Harley in gas, insurance, and parts? Plus my medical bills, and room and board? At least this job lets me ride when I like and live where I want. Plus, every so often I get to meet some good-lookin’ babes.”

That sounded strange; she knew how the helmet had changed her appearance. “You think I’m good-looking?” she asked.

“Yeah. That helmet kinda makes you look like the queen of the Amazons.” He chuckled. “I used to ride with a gal that wore a helmet like that. You ever ride a Harley?”

“No. I’m a librarian.”

“Yeah? I met some librarians at Sturgis last year. That’s a big biker rally in South Dakota. You might like it.” He looked at the horizon. “Hey, we’d better recharge before the Sun goes down.”

“I know.” She put her stew down, opened her pack and got out her recharger. She unrolled the solar-cell foil on the dusty ground and clipped its wire to a strip on her helmet’s rim. A yellow message blinked in the corner of her eyeplate: Recharging. Battery level: 85%. The battery held enough power to last several days, but she felt more secure with a full charge. She wished she could have kept the recharger hooked up while she was walking, but if she fell down or stumbled into something she might wreck it.

Geisler had taken off one of his battery belts and plugged it into his own solar panel, a bigger, dunkier version of her recharger which he had propped against a boulder to catch the Sun better. His old-fashioned prosthetics were nothing like hers, she knew. Underneath his trousers, a network of electrodes would stimulate his muscles with power from the batteries, making the muscles contract in galvanic response. That consumed more power than her system, and it was more vulnerable to damage and breakdowns. “Why don’t you use implants?” she asked in her flat voice.

“What, and let some mad scientist wire a computer into my brain?” He snorted in derision. “The only way anyone is gonna play games with my head is if they cut it off and dribble it like a basketball.” Then he looked abashed. “I guess you didn’t have much choice.”

“No.” She didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her. “What was wrong with putting the cache in the ravine?”

“Two things,” he said. “One, there’s vandals. Some punks ride their dirt-bikes along the trail, see a pile of stones pointing up a ravine, and get curious. Next thing you know, they steal what they like and mess up the rest, and we’re up the creek without a paddle. Or without a creek, out here.” He chuckled nastily. “It’s a long, dry walk home. They shouldn’t be so obvious about marking a cache. The next one might be gone.”

Margaret didn’t like the sound of that. “We could phone for help,” she said.

“Out here?” Geisler made a rude noise. “Maybe a cellular phone would work if you climbed to the top of a hill, but I wouldn’t count on it. Phone service is spotty out here.”

“So we’re on our own.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the general idea.” He picked up a stone and chucked it at the trail. It landed in a puff of dust. “Second thing that’s wrong with using a ravine is rain. The other day they choppered in the supply barrels and cached them here and there. If we’d had a good thunderstorm before we got here, that barrel would have been washed halfway to Barstow, and we’d be back up the dry creek.”

“That mich water?” she asked. She realized she was tired; although she felt no fatigue, exhaustion was making it difficult for her to work the speech icons. “Storms give inch of rain. Or less.”

“Exactly,” Geisler said. “And out here it doesn’t take much rain to make a real gully-washer. It just rolls off the slopes and funnels into the ravines, and the next thing you know there’s a real blast running through all these ravines. See how the dirt and gullies spread out there?” He waved a hand at the ground below the mouth of the valley. “That’s an alluvial fan, made from dirt washed out by different storms. Those boulders were moved by water and gravity, too, and you can guess how big a flood it took to move rocks that size. That’s why we’re camping up here,” he went on. “If a storm blows up while you’re sleeping in an arroyo, the flood will smash you into the rocks so hard that you won’t live long enough to drown.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. She tried to pick out the icons carefully. “Does it rain often?”

“It varies,” Geisler said. “Last year was bone dry. This year, though—” He shrugged. “The California Current shifted last winter and we’re getting these killer storms out of the tropics. The satellite shots didn’t show anything moving our way this morning, but that can change by tomorrow.” He shrugged again. “Look, it’s June. The odds are that we won’t get any rain this late in the year. I just don’t believe in taking airheaded chances.”

“Oh.” Margaret returned her attention to her dinner. The stew had grown cold, but she didn’t care. She had lost her sense of taste and smell, and all food was equally bland to her. Eating was a chore similar to recharging her helmet battery.

Later, as the Sun went down, she unrolled her sleeping bag and inflated its pillow. She needed it to support her helmet, which was surgically attached to her skull; too much weight or pressure might have dislodged the connections between the computer and her brain. Geisler had no such problem. He spread his bedroll on the dirt and went to sleep at once.

Margaret lay awake for a while. At first she regretted not having her tent. It was only a simple plastic tube and a few collapsible poles, she told herself; she could have carried its extra pounds. There were poisonous insects out here, as well as snakes and coyotes, and she would have felt more secure with a roof of some sort over her head. It was cold, too; now that the Sun was down the desert heat fled into the clear black sky.

As she looked at her eyeplate she decided to program in a new movement icon. Blinking and moving her eyes with practiced ease, she called up several menus and selected specific items from each of them: contract both trapezius muscles to raise the scapulae and clavicles. Spread both hands slightly, palms out, with a slight turn of the radius and ulna in both arms. Then, create an icon and add it to the appropriate screen, to be called up and clicked on as needed.

She closed her eyes. All this, she thought, just so she could shrug.

The sunlight woke her at dawn, and after they had breakfast Geisler filled their canteens and finished recharging his batteries. He insisted on having all of their refuse packed into the steel drum, and Margaret made several trips up and down the hillside to clean up the ledge. “Junk lasts forever out here,” Geisler said as she finished, “and I live here.”

“So do scorpions,” she said, with an irritation her voice couldn’t express. He couldn’t carry anything in his hands when he walked, which had left her to do the cleaning. That work had been complicated by the way her body trembled. Cold, she thought. The night sky had seemed to leach the heat from her even through her sleeping bag, and although she had only a vague sensation of being cold, she still shivered.

“Yeah?” He chuckled. “Well, scorpions are mean neighbors, so you don’t want to piss them off by being a slob. You want to visit the powder room before we go?”

“No.” What she wanted to do, she thought, was spend an hour or two in a bathroom with a full tub. Her neural prosthetics didn’t give her a sense of discomfort, but she felt grimy.

Geisler checked the map again as she put on her backpack, then looked up at the clear blue sky. “Gonna be a real scorcher today,” he said, “but if we keep moving we can make the second cache before noon.”

“You said there might be trouble,” Margaret said.

“Uh-huh.” He started walking downhill to the trail. He kept talking as she followed him. “We’ll probably have to do something clever to get it—improvise a ladder, find a way to pry open the lid—well, don’t sweat it.”

Sweat the walk instead, Margaret thought. She kept the thought to herself, however. The trail was still too rough for her computer to navigate, and she had to give her attention to walking and maintaining her balance. The morning’s chill was quickly replaced by heat as the Sun rose higher in the sky.

Geisler called a break when they reached the mouth of an eroded canyon between two low hills. “The second cache is up thataway,” he said as they sat down in the shade of a boulder. “It’s supposed to be exactly one mile from here, on the side of the hill. The sunny side, naturally.”

“Do we go now?” Margaret asked. Only the skin on her face could feel the heat, but she knew the hot air and Sun were taking a toll on her body. She wasn’t eager to get up and start walking again.

“Let’s take five before we move out,” Geisler said. He took a canteen from his belt, drank and passed it to Margaret. “You ever hear anyone say that Arabs are lazy? Well, that’s a crock. Bedouins and Tuaregs live in slow motion because that’s how you get along in the desert.” He looked at the horizon. “Damn.”

“What?”

“Cirrus clouds, coming in from the southwest, just like the wind. Maybe it’s nothing, but it could mean rain later today.”

“Oh. Do you have a radio for a forecast?”

“No, because the local forecasters are all worthless.” He pitched his voice to a nasal whimper: “ ‘Maybe it’ll rain, unless it doesn’t.’ Only forecast I trust is the one I make by looking at the satellite photos, and before you ask, no, I didn’t pack along my sat-TV”

“Oh.” Just the same Margaret activated her computer’s modem, to see if she could download a forecast from the computer net. To her disgust she got nothing but an error message which informed her that the modem could not locate the cellular phone system. Geisler had warned her that the phone service was unreliable in the desert, but it didn’t please her to have his word confirmed.

He chuckled. “Told you so. The phones aren’t much use out here.”

That comment surprised her. “You know I tried to make a call?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. I saw a phone icon on your glass. Don’t worry about calling for help.” He patted his hip pocket. “I brought along an emergency radio. CB channel nine, satellite transponder, Highway Patrol, Civil Air Patrol.”

“Radio works out here?”

“Some frequencies, yeah,” he said. “The cops and the CAP use frequencies that don’t depend on line-of-sight, and there’s always a GPS-2 satellite above the horizon, so we re covered.”

“Oh.” Margaret looked at him. Yesterday she had dismissed what he had said about computer implants; he had come across like some weird old desert bum. Now she didn’t feel so certain, and she wondered what he had against implants. “You seem to know a lot,” she said.

He looked her over for a moment, and she knew that her toneless voice made him wonder how she had meant that remark. He finally shrugged it off. “After I broke my back I spent a lot of years in a wheelchair. When I couldn’t find a job, I’d do a lot of reading, and take courses at a community college. It beat the hell out of vegetating and wishing I could hop back on my Harley.”

“You don’t think much of implants,” she said.

He snorted. “And you think I’ve got some educated reason for that, instead of some ignorant biker reason?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Good point,” he said grudgingly. He drank from one of his canteens. “OK, look. A few hundred million years ago our ancestors were worms. All the brains they had were just a tiny clump of nerves. Well, some of them evolved into fish. They didn’t get new brains; what they did was to add a new layer to their old brains. When they evolved into amphibians, they added a few new layers of brain tissue. The next step, the reptiles, added more layers. So did the mammals, when they came along, and the monkeys added the last few layers. Each new chunk of brain evolved to handle a specific task—recognizing a bit of food when it floated in front of a fish, figuring out the distance to a branch when a monkey had to jump from tree to tree, whatever.

“That’s why our brains are this complicated mess of things like the neo-cortex and the R-complex and the amygdala, instead of one smooth, uniform collection of nerves. And that’s why we’ve got intelligence. All of the different bits of the brain only do one job, but they also coordinate with one another, and when they run into a problem, they pass it around from bit to bit until the problem lands in the lap of whatever chunk of the brain is designed to handle it.”

“I know,” Margaret said. She had heard that was the latest trend in artificial intelligence research. Scientists were trying to make a computer that was as smart as a human by linking together many small, specialized circuits into a coordinated network. Some of their techniques were used in her computer, making it the equivalent of what Geisler called “a chunk of the brain.”

“If you know it all, I don’t have to explain,” Geisler said. He shrugged after a moment of silence. “OK, I like hearing myself talk. All of the brain’s little chunks know how to work together. If you have a stroke or something, they’ll try to learn how to work without the missing part. So what happens when you patch a computer into that arrangement?”

“All my computer does is replace a few of the damaged parts of brain,” Margaret said. “It gives me a sense of touch and activates my peripheral nervous system. It doesn’t interfere with anything.”

“Bull,” Geisler said. “It reads your brainwaves like an encephalograph would, and all those electrodes pump in electricity and stimulate parts of your brain. It also links together some of the areas that were separated when you got sick. That’s what I call interference, and I doubt the doctors know everything it does. Maybe your brain is going to learn how to use that implant, until the two kinda melt together.”

“Good,” she said. “Maybe then I’ll be able to move and talk without needing these damned icons.”

“And maybe by then you won’t know if you’re a computer or a woman,” Geisler said.

“You’re a real comfort,” Margaret said.

He shrugged. “Well, hey, that’s part of the service.”

“I see.” She looked at him for a moment, and found herself thinking of something that seemed obvious—now. “Did they tell you to keep an eye on me?”

Geisler snorted. “They didn’t have to,” he said.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Margaret said.

He shrugged. “They said you might try to waste yourself.”

Suicidal impulses? she thought in surprise. “I’ve never thought about killing myself.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t sound like he believed her. “They tell me you’re a prime candidate for the easy out, lady. They ask you about your daughter and your husband, and you clam up.”

“How would you know?”

Geisler chuckled. “Community college, remember? I took a lot of courses on psychology and therapy—how do you think I qualified for a job taking folks like you on therapeutic excursions?”

“So they briefed you on me.”

“Uh-huh. What they told me was, you, your husband and your daughter got immunized against the Hanoi flu last year, when everyone expected a killer epidemic. Only you and the girl had a bad reaction to the shots, because you both have the same defective gene. The shots ate away at your central nervous systems. You lived because they got you into intensive care in time, but it hit your girl harder and she died.

“OK, the girl inherited that gene from you, so you blame yourself for her death. Only, so does your husband, because he’s the sort of guy who needs to blame somebody. You were learning how to walk again when the creep filed for divorce. He dumps a load of guilt on you, and then he dumps you like garbage. With problems like that, you’ve got reason to end it all.”

“I know.” She felt her head buzzing. Everything he had said sounded distant, as though he had been describing something that had happened to a peasant in ancient Sumeria. “But I haven’t thought about killing myself.”

“If you say so,” Geisler said. “But from what they tell me, maybe you haven’t thought, period. I figure you’re blocking it out, which is the sort of thing that catches up with you.”

“You want me to talk about what happened.”

“That’s part of my job.”

She clicked on the movement icon that made her nod. “What do you want me to say?”

He shrugged. “Your girl’s name was Lydia, right? How often do you think about what happened to her?”

Margaret tried to think. It was difficult, like trying to multiply several large numbers in her head. She felt herself losing track of everything. “I don’t know. I don’t have much time for thought. There’s therapy, and I have to practice speech and movement on my own, and program in new movement and dexterity icons every time I need to do something new, and—”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Not changing it,” Margaret said. “Just explaining why—”

“You lived and she didn’t,” Geisler said. “How do you feel about that?”

It was a moment before Margaret could work her speech icons. Geisler waited patiently through the silence. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wish it were the other way around, but it isn’t. Do you think my implant has something to do with how I feel?”

“No,” he said, “you’re doing it to yourself. You had more than you could handle, so you blanked it out.

People do that, to give themselves a temporary break. But you’re making it permanent.”

“Maybe,” Margaret said. “Look. Our canteens are almost empty. We should talk about this later.”

“Yeah, right,” he said sourly. He stood up. “Let’s get to the next cache.”

Margaret got up and followed him. The trail ran along the hillside, well above the canyon floor. The path seemed little smoother than the rough, steep ground all around her, and she spent an hour picking her way along. The breeze began to pick up, and dust started to fog her eye-plate, forcing her to stop several times to wash it off.

I haven’t let myself think about it, she told herself as the computer walked her across one of the few smooth strips of path. Quite deliberately, Margaret stopped walking and tried to think about… it. Why Lydia was gone. Why Alan was gone. She tried to focus her attention on her memories, but it was like trying to look at something in her eye’s blind spot.

The computer. She wondered if Geisler could be right about that. Maybe it was doing something to her mind. It wasn’t natural to feel this lack of grief and loss. She should have felt something; Lydia deserved it.

But she could remember Lydia before her death. A lovely six-year-old having a normal childhood. Father’s chin, mother’s hair, nose, and cheeks distinctly her own. Her favorite videotape had been a Bolshoi Ballet production of Swan Lake, she had liked to sprawl in front of the TV and admire the pretty costumes the ballerinas wore. Alan had taken that tape after—

Keep walking, she told herself. This hike was only a form of therapy, but the Sun and scorching air were real. She needed to reach the water in the next cache before she could think about less immediate problems. She started walking again. The trail curved up the hillside and came to a fairly smooth and level stretch of ground. As she reached that, Margaret felt absurdly pleased by the sight. It appeared she would be able to walk at least a hundred yards without trouble here. This was the best ground she had seen out here.

Then Geisler cut loose with a string of profanity. “Trouble?” Margaret asked, as she came up behind him.

“Yeah, trouble,” he said in disgust. The path came to a dead end at a gully which cut across the slope and emptied into the main arroyo some fifty yards away. The gully was fifteen feet deep and ten feet wide, and it was crossed by a crude bridge: a wooden beam four inches square, with two guide rails made of rope at waist height. The guidelines were held in the ground by long iron stakes, and they swayed in the breeze. “No way am I crossing that,” Geisler said.

“That must be the idea,” Margaret said. His fingers couldn’t operate his prosthetics while his hands clutched the lines. “I can handle it.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked up at the sky. “Better move. Those aren’t rain clouds, but I don’t like what this wind is doing.”

“Dust storm?” she asked.

“Right, dust storm. Now move.”

Margaret went to the bridge and hesitated. Until now she’d never encountered a situation like this. Just how did you cross a rope and wood bridge? She had no movement icon she could click on, to let the computer guide her body like a marionette.

Marionettes, she thought suddenly, operated through crude, basic movements. That was the trick. She stepped up to the end of the bridge and grasped the rope guidelines. Then she selected a set of basic icons. Right foot forward. Right foot down. Left foot forward. Left foot down. Release right hand. Move right hand forward. Put right hand palm on rope. Grip rope. Release left hand. Motions repeated with painful slowness, made even slower by the shifting of her body as the helmet struggled to keep her in balance against the buffeting of the wind, which was rising. Putting her foot down on the beam with each step was even trickier.

At last she was across the bridge. “I’ll go look for the cache,” she told Geisler, who stood at the far end of the bridge.

“Don’t talk, do!” he called.

The ground beyond the bridge was even rougher than the path she had followed so far, and as the wind gusted in the narrow canyon it filled the air with swirls of tan dust. Her eye-plate worked like goggles, but even so she almost missed the cache in the thickening haze: a pile of canteens and a sack of freeze-dried food. Margaret slung the canteen straps over her shoulders and took the sack. She looked inside and saw the map which marked out the trail to the next cache. Then she headed back for the bridge.

The wind was howling when she reached the bridge. Geisler was gone, and one of the guidelines was down, its iron stake pulled out of the ground on the other side of the bridge. Another part of the therapy? she wondered, before she looked down into the arroyo. Geisler lay on the rocks at its bottom. He looked unconscious.

Margaret clicked on her modem and tried to phone for help, but when she hit 9-1-1 the eyeplate flashed an error message at her. So much for calling in the cavalry, she thought, as she wondered how she was going to get Geisler out of the crevasse.

She shucked her backpack and the canteens, and looked at the bridge. She didn’t see how she could cross it now. The iron stakes on her side of the bridge remained in place, but one of the ropes lay draped down the side of the arroyo. Its end remained tied to the rod which had pulled out of the ground; the bent stake lay a few yards from Geisler.

He’s supposed to be the survival expert, Margaret told herself; he’ll know what to do. First, however, she had to reach him. She moved along the edge of the arroyo until she found a spot in its side that looked less jagged than the rest of the wall. She hesitated a moment, then began to pick her way down the mess of boulders and rock ledges, using every handhold she could find during the cautious descent.

Lowering herself fifteen feet took as many minutes, and she needed as much time to reach Geisler. He was conscious now, and he had propped himself up against a boulder. He had ripped open a pants leg, exposing the wires and control pads of his manipulator. He had also tied a gauze compress over his shin, and Margaret saw bruised flesh and drying blood around the bandage’s edges. “What happened?” she asked.

“I was born an idiot, that’s what happened,” he growled. He spat and wiped dust and sweat from his face. “The wind blew and I started to lose my balance, so I tried to grab a rope.” He held up a hand and clenched a fist. “Goddamned controls. I made myself kick like a prima ballerina, and I went over the edge.”

“Can you walk?”

Geisler shook his head. “Ripped out a bunch of wires. At least I can’t feel nothin’ down there.”

“Radio,” she said.

“Already tried it,” he said. He reached out and picked up a twisted plastic card which lay in the dirt. “It gave its life to help break my fall. You can bet I’m gonna write the maker and bitch about their ‘indestructible’ guarantee.”

“We have to get you out of here.”

“Don’t I know it.” He jerked a thumb at the sky, which was obscured by blowing dust. “This wind’s coming from the southwest, and right before I fell I saw black clouds on the southwest horizon.”

“Rain. Coming this way.”

Geisler nodded. “You’ve got one hour, tops, before this arroyo turns into a garbage disposal. The way you move, you have just enough time to get out of here. Get uphill. I saw a rock face up there; it’ll shield you from the water. Stay low to the ground, too. You don’t want to draw lightning.”

He’s telling me he won’t make it, she thought. He was right; there was nothing she could do. That realization made her feel like—like—the way she had when Alan had blamed her for Lydia’s death. Not angry, not hurt. Frustrated, as he blamed her for one mistake, then blamed her for another before she could work her speech icons quickly enough to answer his first accusation. Then left her alone, to bear everything by herself.

Margaret willed down the sudden flood of memories; she had no time for them. “I’m getting you out of here,” she told Geisler.

Geisler made a rude noise. “Maggie, there’s no way I can pull myself out of here with just my arms, and you sure as hell can’t carry me. I weigh twice what you do.”

“Shut up. Think. We have rope.”

“And two idiots instead of one.” Geisler scowled. “OK. Gimme that rope.”

Margaret took the fallen guideline and handed it to him. Geisler untied the end of the rope from the iron stake and looped it under his armpits. “Get up there and pull on the other end. Maybe you can give me enough of a boost that I can make it just climbing with my arms.” He glared at her. “But if I start to pull you down, let go. It won’t do neither of us any good if you fall down here, too.”

“It won’t work,” she said. She knew she couldn’t haul enough weight to help him. Then she saw it. “Try this. I pull on rope with lever. You guide with arms.”

“What lever?” he asked.

“Beam from bridge. Move you a yard at a time up the side.”

“Goddamn,” he muttered. He sounded surprised, as though he understood what she meant and thought it might work. “OK, go.”

Wordlessly, Margaret turned and faced the gully’s ragged side. There was no time to stumble back to where she had climbed down; she started climbing, hoping that she would find adequate footholds and handholds as she went along.

She was barely right. Several times her hands and feet slipped when she misjudged her movements, but she managed to cling to the rocks. Ten minutes later she had pulled herself over the rim. The windblown dust was growing thicker, but she could still see well enough to work.

She went to the wrecked bridge, grasped the end of the wooden beam in both hands, and pulled. Its far end dropped into the arroyo, but she kept her grip on it and continued pulling. Inch by inch, she dragged it up and onto the ground. She laid it parallel to the fissure’s edge, several yards back and with one end lined up with Geisler’s location. She went to the iron stake and fumbled with the knot that held the line in place. Her fingers were clumsy, but after a few minutes she had the knot undone. She took the rope to the beam and tied it around the end.

That was her lever; now she needed a fulcrum. A large boulder set in the ground would have been convenient, but the ground was too clear here. No matter. She took the iron stake in both hands and pulled it back and forth as she worked it out of the ground. It ended in a sharp point, and when she carried it over to the beam she was able to push it six inches deep in the ground alongside the beam. She picked up a rock in both hands and used it as a hammer, pounding the stake deeper into the ground. It went down two feet before it struck a buried rock and stopped.

It would have to do. Margaret looped the rope’s slack around the end of the beam, then went to the other end and sat down by it, facing the gully. She put her feet against the wood and shoved. Reluctantly, the beam began to move, jerking a few inches at a time. When she pushed the horizontal lever as far as she could she got up and went to the gully. She looked over the edge and saw that Geisler was clinging to the rocks, a yard or so from the spot where he had fallen. He looked up and nodded tiredly; his mouth worked, but the wind drowned out his words.

Margaret went back to the beam. She pushed its end back toward the gully, then wrapped the newly-slackened rope around its end until it was taut. She returned to the other end of the beam, sat down, planted her feet against it again and shoved. She repeated the process over and over, while the wind rose to a howl and she felt dust and grit blast against her chin.

A fat raindrop splashed against her eyeplate, leaving a splotch of mud in the dust caking the glass. Another drop followed it, then another. An arm appeared above the gully’s rim, flailed around and clutched the ground, and Geisler hauled himself into the open. Margaret picked up one of the canteens and took it to him. “Goddamn,” he gasped after he had drained it. “Made it.”

“Safe now,” Margaret said.

He shook his head, then pointed to a heap of boulders a hundred feet away. “Let’s get over there,” he said. “When the rain picks up, this ground’ll get muddy. Slippery. Things get bad enough, we’ll get flushed into the gully, and then it’s all over.”

“Will it be dry over there?” she asked.

“No, but we won’t get flooded out. Take the stuff over there. We’ll need it.”

Margaret picked up the canteens and carried them over to the boulders. As she turned back she saw Geisler pulling himself along the ground on his hands. He made good time, she thought as she retrieved the sack of food. The rain swiftly grew heavier, and Margaret began to slip as the dirt turned to mud. She ended up crawling the last few yards to where Geisler sat.

“Good spot,” he said as she sat down next to him in the lee of a boulder. He began to open up his bedroll. “We’re pretty much out of the wind, and we’re on the downhill slope here, so we re protected from anything that washes down from farther uphill.”

“Need my pack,” Margaret said. Her recharger was in it, along with her sleeping bag.

“Forget it,” Geisler told her. He nodded at the slope, where sheets of muddy rainwater cascaded into the gully. “You slip now, you won’t stop until you go over the edge. So sit tight.”

She was about to answer when light glared in the distance. “Lightning,” Margaret said.

Geisler nodded and draped the bedroll over them. His lips moved silently, and she realized he was counting off the seconds until the thunder came. “Three miles off,” he said. “Don’t worry about the lightning. It’ll hit higher up, on the hilltops.”

“Good. How long will the rain last?”

“Beats me. Why? You goin’ anywhere?”

“No.” The rain washed the grime from her eyeplate, but the water swiftly turned her view into a sheeting blur. “Are you all right?”

“I’m a little banged up,” he admitted. “I guess the trip is over. Think you can make it back to town without me, and get some help?”

“Yes.”

“Good, ’cause I’m stuck here. Glad you saved the water and food. You’ll need ’em for the walk tomorrow.”

“Yes.” We must still be in serious trouble, she thought, if he thinks I have to make a walk like that alone. But she could do it. And there was something else. “I remembered what happened,” she said.

“Huh?”

“To Lydia. Alan.”

Under the bedroll, he put an arm around her shoulder. “You going to talk about it, Maggie?”

“Not much to say,” she told him. “What you sdaid about what happened was right. I don’t know why I coulnt think of it before. But I remember some things now.”

“Like what?”

“I missed Lydia’s funeral. And Alan blamed me for everything. I let him because I wanted to believe it was my fault.”

“Yeah? Why?”

She tried to think. “If it was my fault, it meant I could have done something to keep Lydia alive. A thing can’t be your fault if you couldn’t do anything.”

Geisler nodded. “And you want to believe you could’ve saved the kid. If a whole hospital couldn’t do it, how could you? And you can’t live with guilt like that. If you don’t kill yourself over it, it’ll drive you nuts.”

“I know. But I know I never thought about killing myself.” She paused. “Or I don’t remember thinking about it. I can’t remember what any of it felt like, either. I don’t think I felt anything then.”

“You will,” he said.

Margaret thought he sounded grim. It was grim, she thought. It would be like having surgery without an anesthetic.

The rain grew heavier, and between the noise of its pounding and the wind talk became impossible. The black clouds cut out most of the sunlight, and Margaret could barely see ten yards as the rain churned the slope into mud. Lightning struck closer and closer, and she wondered what the discharges might do to her helmet’s systems. Her circuits were shielded, but the shielding could be overloaded. Then she heard Geisler’s voice, half-lost in the sheeting rain as he said something about crispy critters. Margaret had to laugh at the reminder that the lightning could do something more overwhelming than damage a tew circuits.

There was nothing she could do about that. She thought about Lydia and Alan instead. Reviewing her memories of the past—what, she wondered in surprise, ten months?—she felt baffled by the way her mind had worked. Things had happened, but she had blanked them out almost immediately. The frantic afternoon after they had received the flu shots, with Lydia falling down every time she tried to stand up and Margaret staggering around like a drunk, her voice growing slurred, while Alan packed them into the car and rushed them to the hospital. Lydia getting CPR in the emergency room, too late, while she was wheeled out on a gurney. Days on life support in the ICU. Alan taking an almost sadistic glee as he described Lydia’s funeral.

She could concentrate on the memories now, but they remained as remote as a stranger’s photo album. She wondered what she could have done to keep Lydia from dying. Not have her immunized? But there had been no way to know that she would react as she did to the shot. Get her to the hospital faster? Or a different hospital? The doctors hadn’t known how to stop the damage from the shot; they didn’t even know why it had stopped with Margaret when she still had her eyes and ears.

Alone. That had been the worst of it, even worse than Lydia’s death. Alone, not just because her daughter and husband were gone and their apartment was gathering dust. Alone because she was living in a hospital, with friends and relatives limited to visiting hours. Alone because for the first month she had been unable to talk, unable to tell anyone how she felt. Unable to say that the therapists’ well-intended monologues about grief and healing were torture.

The wind gusted, hard, and something cold and wet slapped Margaret in the face. Geisler swore and grabbed at the bedroll as the wind carried it off. It landed only a few feet away, but before Margaret could switch to her movement icons, the mud and water carried it downhill, toward the gully. Geisler huddled closer to her and tried to shield her from the rain. “I wondered when things would get interesting,” he muttered.

“Trouble?” Margaret asked.

“You might say so,” he said. He gestured to the arroyo, where the bedroll had vanished. “No blanket, no sleeping bag. We’re gonna freeze tonight.” Margaret remembered how cold it had been last night. It might not cause her any discomfort, she reflected, but she could still die from exposure. So could Geisler. “Ideas?”

“This rain will stop in a while,” he said. “The clouds should break an hour or so later. When they do, we can dry out in the Sun. Bein’ cold and dry beats being cold and wet.”

“Will anyone look for us before dark?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Geisler said. “We’re supposed to be surviving on our own, and everyone knows I’ve made it through worse storms than this.”

And they would need a helicopter to reach us, Margaret thought. Nobody was coming up here on foot, or in any kind of a vehicle, not until the ground dried out.

Margaret clicked on her time icon. To her surprise it was already four in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember when the Sun had set last night, but she thought it was some time between eight and nine. That would leave only four hours or so of daylight.

The rain ended and the clouds began to break after a half-hour. Geisler dragged himself away from the rocks and out into the Sun. “Have to try to stay out of the wind tonight,” he said, as he peeled off his jacket. He lay it on the muddy ground to dry. “You better get something to eat, Maggie. It won’t hurt me to lose a few pounds, but you’re gonna need your strength.”

“Yes.” She went to the bag and dug into it. She found a ham sandwich; the bag had leaked and it was soggy, but she didn’t care. When she had finished she tried her modem again, with no luck. It seemed unfair. The phone company claimed that its cellular service covered every inch of the West. Well, that probably meant they had only covered the towns and roads out in the boondocks, as well as some of the more isolated tourist sites.

Geisler had said something. She remembered it now. She walked over to him. “You said my modem might work if I climbed a hill.”

“It might,” he said. “If you got high enough to get in the line of sight with a phone station, and if you’re in range of it, and if the storm didn’t knock it out.” He looked around, then pointed uphill. “That’s the only high ground you’re going to reach today; maybe it’s high enough. Gonna be slippery.”

“Yes,” she said, glad that he hadn’t tried to argue. She looked at the slope, set her cursor on a fairly even stretch of ground, and started walking.

It was slow going. Her feet kept skidding on the muddy ground, and the top of the hill always seemed to be another hundred feet ahead of her, just beyond one more gentle rise in the ground. She tried her modem several times on the way up, without results. She kept telling herself that her luck would change when she reached the summit.

And that had better be soon, she thought as a yellow light winked on her display. The computer was warning her that her body was getting tired, with fatigue poisons building up in her blood and muscles, and blood-sugar levels dropping to a critical level. Fairly soon her muscles would stop responding to her inputs.

The top of the hill was a rise not much different from the last dozen swellings she had crossed, and she reached it two hours after she had left Geisler. It was like being on top of the world; she could see several roads and one highway in the distance, and a small town far to the east, beyond the hills. She clicked on her modem and entered 9-1-1.

A voice, female and mechanical, spoke in her ears. “We are sorry. Phone service has been temporarily disrupted. We are working to restore service. Please try again.”

I could be up here all night, Margaret thought in frustration. She wondered how long it would take the phone company to get everything working again. Their repair service was supposed to be good, but everything was bound to take longer out in the boondocks. She would have to wait. At least that would give her a chance to rest.

She sat on a boulder and looked around. The skies were clearing rapidly and the evening Sun felt warm and good. The view to the west—a decade before her birth Buzz Aldrin had stood on the Moon and described the lunar surface as “magnificent desolation,” comparing it to the high deserts of California. The Moon must be a beautiful place, she thought, if it was anything like this. Sun glinted off several small, temporary ponds like fire on a mirror.

Margaret was so taken with the view that she almost didn’t notice the sound. It was a buzzing noise, low and distant. Not an insect, she thought, before she realized she was hearing the drone of a single-engine airplane. She looked, and after a moment she spotted it, a dark shape flying just above the western horizon.

Almost without thought she knew exactly what to do. She set her eyeplate to maximum reflectivity, and her view darkened as the plate turned itself into a mirrored sunglass. Then she began to nod her head: three fast nods, three slow nods, three fast nods. Over and over, to flash out a Morse SOS.

She kept it up until sunset, when she heard the roar of the rescue helicopter. By then the yellow warning light had turned red.

Margaret was sitting up in the hospital bed when Geisler walked into the room. “Fast,” she said. “Thought it would take days for them to get you walking again.”

“It did,” he said. He stood at her bedside. “You’ve been out for two days. Exhaustion, mostly, and exposure.”

“I guess I wouldn’t have made it through the whole trip,” she said.

He shrugged. “You lasted long enough to save both our butts, which is what counts.”

“Yes. What happened after that plane saw my signals?”

“Plane?” he repeated. He shook his head. “I don’t know about any plane. Somebody on the highway saw a light in the hills, and when he realized it was blinking out an SOS he called the local cops. One of them remembered we were out there, and they called in a rescue copter. They homed in on the light reflecting from your helmet. That was good thinking.”

“Thanks.” She hesitated, puzzled. “Don’t know where I got the idea. It just—” She hesitated again. Now she could remember a train of thought so rapid she had hardly noticed it at the time. Sunlight reflecting off water had suggested a mirror, which had suggested her eyeplate, and the sound of the airplane had reminded her of an old war movie in which a crashed pilot had used a mirror to signal a rescue plane. She wondered if her com puter implant had had anything to do with it. She knew she’d never thought so fast in her life, not by herself.

Geisler couldn’t know what she was thinking. “It just popped into your head?” he asked. “Well, who knows where ideas come from?”

Margaret didn’t answer. I kept him alive, she thought as she looked at him. There was a way to keep him alive, and I found it, and he lived. If there had been a way to do that for Lydia, I would have found it. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t work a miracle.

“… Talked to your doctors,” Geisler was saying. “They figure that the computer was screwing around with your head, like you said. It tries to coordinate with your brain, you see, and every time it sensed things were getting out of control—like when you’d get a strong impulse to kill yourself, or when you got too upset over life—it stepped in and tried to cancel out the problem by feeding in its own electrical impulses.”

“Keeping me alive,” Margaret said.

“Not on purpose,” Geisler said. “It was just protecting itself from overloading. There’s a negative-feedback routine in its program, but nobody expected it to do this.”

It kept me from thinking until I could handle everything, Margaret told herself. Until I knew Lydia’s death wasn’t my fault. Until I knew….

The tears of grief and loss blurred her icons, making it impossible to speak or move. Geisler sat down on the chair beside the bed. He said nothing; he was just there, which was enough.

Until I knew I was no longer alone, she thought.