Best of If by Philip K. Dick

Author:Philip K. Dick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library & Archives Canada

In the hospital room, gross vibrations had been dampened to a remote hush. Slatted blinds were closed against raw morning sunlight. The bedside lamp had been turned off. But there still was a soft harmonic reflection from cream-colored walls that mingled with the even hiss of sleep breathing.

Sam lay on his back in the room’s single bed, eyes closed. His chest under a green humming of blanket rose and fell gently. Somewhere, a pumping motor throbbed its obbligato. Distantly, stiff little shuntings and pantings and screechings told of city traffic. Ether trailed its solo virtuosity through the air, riding on a wave of disinfectant. A nurse’s heels along the hall added an abrupt random rhythm that wove back and forth…back and forth through the other vibrations in a way that excited the connoisseur sense of the figure on the bed.

(After all, the long, virtual silence of the migration had now been recalled. In a sense, it was starved for these wonderful “noises.”)

Outside the half-opened door of the room, a doctor could be heard talking to Beverly, Sam’s wife. The doctor was tall, a beak-nosed shape: pink and blond with white on white on white echoing across the image. Acrid little shouts came from his hands, clinkings from his pockets, and a buzzing of tobacco rode his breath.

There had been a strange dual recognition of Beverly: a sense of familiarity with her dark hair, soft curve of cheeks, alert gray-green eyes. (The Sam-memories, of course.) And there had been added to this a pungent explosion of perfume-base powder (still familiar, yes, but heightened to an indescribable pitch), plus a glissando of gold necklace on green coat on green suit, all played against a bright beating of gold-bronze buttons. (And there was much more, but without chilitigish awareness in the reader, the effects are meaningless.)

The doctor’s voice carried a drum quality as he uttered cautious reassurances. “There is no doubt that it’s some type of narcolepsy,” he said. “But there’s no enlargement of the lymphatic glands. His pulse and respiration are normal. Temperature’s up, but not dangerously. I’m inclined to suspect this may be a reaction due to nervous strain. Has he been working very hard?”

“Narcolepsy, narcolepsy, narcolepsy,” whispered the Siukurnin with its Sam-lips. Well…they weren’t exactly Sam-lips now. They were much more accurately Sam(to the Siukurnin power) lips.

You just have to understand that single-ego orientation sets up difficult problems in communications here. What you would consider odd and irresistible things had been happening to Sam and Siukurnin. Cilia of Siukurnin had gone creeping and seeking of their own volition. It was now a great thin net spread throughout the host. Wherever it touched nerve cells — in brain and elsewhere — subtle displacements occurred at the subcellular level. New memories (Sam-memories) filtered into Siukurnin. And Siukurnin memories, of course, filtered back to Sam. (This is one of those processes that just cannot be confined to a one-way circuit.)

Things had gone so far that Siukurnin had displaced the temporary migration-ego. And Sam

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