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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (33)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 15:07:51 1999), 转信

                         33
                        Betty

Why had he come here returning like an unquiet ghost to
the scene of ancient anguish? He had no idea; indeed, he had
not been conscious of his destination, until the round eye of
Crystal Spring had gazed up at him from the forest below
  He was master of the world, yet he was paralysed by a
sense of devastating grief he had not known for years. Time
had healed the wound, as it always docs; yet it seemed only
yesterday that he had stood weeping beside the emerald
mirror, seeing only the reflections of the surrounding
cypresses with their burden of Spanish moss. What was
happening to him?
  And now, still without deliberate volition, but as if swept
by some gentle current, he was drifting northward, toward
the state capital. He was looking for something; what it
was, he would not know until he found it.
  No one, and no instrument, detected his passage. He was
no longer radiating wastefully, but had almost mastered his
control of energy, as once he had mastered lost though not
forgotten limbs. He sank like a mist into the earthquake-
proof vaults, until he found himself among billions of
stored memories, and dazzling, flickering networks of elec-
tronic thoughts.
  This task was more complex than the triggering of a
crude nuclear bomb, and took him a little longer. Before he
found the information he was seeking, he made one trivial
slip,  but  did not bother to correct it. No one ever under-
stood  why,  the  next  month,  three  hundred  Florida tax-
payers,  all  of  whose names began with F, received cheques
for precisely one dollar. It cost many times the overpayment
to  straighten  matters  out,  and  the  baffled  computer en-
gineers  finally  put  the  blame  on  a  cosmic-ray shower.
Which, on the whole, was not so very far from the truth.
  In  a  few  milliseconds, he had moved from Tallahassee to
634  South  Magnolia  Street,  Tampa.  It was still the same
address; he need not have wasted time looking it up.
  But  then.  he had never intended to look it up, until the
very moment when he had done so.
  After  three  births  and  two  abortions, Betty Fernandez
(nee  Schultz) was  still  a  beautiful woman. At the moment
she  was  also a very thoughtful one; she was watching a TV
programme   that   brought   back   memories,   bitter   and
sweet.
  It  was a News Special, triggered by the mysterious events
of  the  preceding  twelve hours, beginning with the warning
that  Leonov  had  beamed  back  from  the moons of Jupiter.
Something  was  heading  for  Earth;  something  had - harm-
lessly  -  detonated  an  orbiting nuclear bomb which no one
had  come  forward  to claim. That was all, but it was quite
enough.
  The   news   commentators  had  dredged  up  all  the  old
videotapes  -  and  some  of  them really were tapes - going
back  to  the  once top-secret records showing the discovery
of  TMA-1  on the Moon. For the fiftieth time, at least, she
heard  that  eerie  radio shriek as the monolith greeted the
lunar  dawn  and  hurled  its  message  toward  Jupiter.  And
once  again  she watched the familiar scenes and listened to
the old interviews aboard Discovery.
  Why  was  she  watching?  It  was  all stored somewhere in
the  home  archives  (though  she  never played it back when
Jose  was  around).  Perhaps  she  was  expecting  some news
flash; she did not like to admit, even to herself, how much
power the past still held over her emotions.
  And there was Dave, as she had expected. It was an old
BBC interview, of which she knew almost every word. He
was talking about Hal, trying to decide whether the compu-
ter was self-conscious or not.
  How young he looked - how different from those last
blurred images from the doomed Discovery! And how much
like Bobby as she remembered him.
  The image wavered as her eyes filled with tears. No -
something was wrong with the set, or the channel. Both
sound and image were behaving erratically.
  Dave's lips were moving, but she could hear nothing.
Then his face seemed to dissolve, to melt into blocks of
colour. It reformed, blurred again, and then was steady
once more. But there was still no sound.
  Where had they got this picture! This was not Dave as a
man, but as a boy - as she had known him first. He was
looking out of the screen almost as if he could see her across
the gulf of years.
  He smiled; his lips moved.
  `Hello, Betty,' he said.
  It was not hard to form the words, and to impose them on
the currents pulsing in the audio circuits. The real difficulty
was to slow down his thoughts to the glacial tempo of the
human brain. And then to have to wait an eternity for the
answer...
  Betty Fernandez was tough; she was also intelligent, and
though she had been a housewife for a dozen years, she had
not forgotten her training as an electronics serviceperson.
This was just another of the medium's countless miracles of
simulation; she would accept it now, and worry about the
details later.
  `Dave,' she answered. `Dave - is that really you?'
  `I am not sure,' replied the image on the screen, in a
curiously toneless voice. `But I remember Dave Bowman,
and everything about him.'
  `Is he dead?'
  Now that was another difficult question.
  'His body - yes. But that is no longer important. All that
Dave Bowman really was, is still part of me.'
  Betty crossed herself- that was a gesture she had learned
from Jose - and whispered:
  `You mean - you're a spirit?'
  'I do not know a better word.'
  `Why have you returned?'
  `Ah! Betty - why indeed! I wish you could tell me.'
  Yet he knew one answer, for it was appearing on the TV
screen. The divorce between body and mind was still far
from complete, and not even the most complaisant of the
cable networks would have transmitted the blatantly sexual
images that were forming there now.
  Betty watched for a little while, sometimes smiling,
sometimes shocked. Then she turned away, not through
shame but sadness - regret for lost delights.
  'So it's not true, she said, `what they always told us about
angels.'
  Am I an angel? he wondered. But at least he understood
what he was doing there, swept back by the tides of sorrow
and desire to a rendezvous with his past. The most powerful
emotion he had ever known had been his passion for Betty;
the elements of grief and guilt it contained only made it
stronger.
  She had never told him if he was a better lover than
Bobby; that was one question he had never asked, for that
would have broken the spell. They had clung to the same
illusion, sought in each other's arms (and how young he had
been - still only seventeen when it had started, barely two
years after the funeral!) a balm For the same wound.
  Of course, it could not last, but the experience had left
him  irrevocably  changed.  For  more than a decade, all his
autoerotic  fantasies  had  centred upon Betty; he had never
found  another  woman  to  compare  with  her,  and long ago
had  realized  that he never would. No one else was haunted
by the same beloved ghost.
  The  images  of  desire  faded  from the screen; for a mo-
ment,  the  regular  programme  broke  through,  with an in-
congruous  shot  of  Leonov  hanging  above  Io.  Then Dave
Bowman's  face  reappeared.  He seemed to be losing control,
for  its  lineaments  were  wildly  unstable.  Sometimes  he
would  seem  only  ten  years  old - then twenty or thirty -
then,  incredibly,  a  wizened  mummy  whose  wrinkled  fea-
tures were a parody of the man she had once known.
  `I  have  one  more  question  before  I  go. Carlos - you
always  said  he was Jose's son, and I always wondered. What
was the truth?'
  Betty  Fernandez  stared  for one long, last time into the
eyes  of  the boy she had once loved (he was eighteen again.
and  for  a moment she wished she could see his entire body,
not merely his face).
  `He was your son, David,' she whispered.
  The   image   faded;  the  normal  service  resumed.  When,
almost  an  hour  later, Jose Fernandez came quietly into the
room, Betty was still staring at the screen.
  She did not turn around as he kissed her on the back of the
neck.
  `You'll never believe this, Jose.'
  `Try me.'
  `I've just lied to a ghost.'

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