Human in the Circuit - Collected Stories by Howard V. Hendrix

Author:Howard V. Hendrix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
ISBN: 9781434439864
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHIN IN AIR

Infant Jack, Mom, Dad and me. Earliest memories. I can’t remember a time when Jack wasn’t. That would be like trying to remember my naveling, when the doctors holed my belly, unplugging me from Mom and holed my skull so they could plug me into the world. I’ve met people who say they remember even the instant of their own engendering. Close as I can come is a shuttle sliding into a docking bay at Habitat Orbital LaGrange.

Between the sun and moon, between the two masks of the one dream, I see with my naked face the man on the snohorse at sunset in the Martian Highlands, riding the range, tending the fences, bringing in strays, finding my brother Jack’s body decayed and desiccated, frozen to death to be found months later when I will remember dreaming this and putting it out of my mind.

“Mommy, why’d we move to the ’borbs?” Jack asks.

“Because Earth City’s too multicolored,” Mommy replies, soundwashing the dishes. “The yellows and browns started hi-teching and there went the neighborhood.”

“Mother, don’t tell the boy that!” says Daddy in his docile way. “He’ll think we’ve got the white flight. Like we’re some of the Master Race in Outer Space types or something. Be sensible. Boys, we moved to the habitat orbitals because we think this is a better place for you to grow up. Old Mother Earth is just too overpopulated, corporate-dominated, and heatgas insulated.”

“Your father should know,” Mom chimes in irritably. “He’s one small shot for the Global Atmospheric Information Administration—but one big shot in his mind.”

Home, home on LaGrange, where the peers in their satellites reign. Where Jack and I grow up normally enough.

“Jackhead! Jackhead! Jack is a Jackhead!”

“Shut up!” Jack cries. “I’ll tell Mom!”

“Go ahead!” I taunt. I don’t know what he’s so upset about. Everybody has a headplug, a jack in his head—I’m just saying Jack is one, is all. “You always ‘tell Mom’.”

I’m two years older and better than Jack is at most things. Except drowning. “Watch!” he says. At the edge of the deep end in the one-gee Sunlite Pool, I watch, prepared to be unimpressed. He slides beneath the water’s surface, face down and arms outstretched like Superman in flight. He begins to exhale bubbles then streams of air from his mouth and nostrils—and he starts to sink. Faster and faster the air floods out of him, faster and faster he sinks. When the last burst of bubbles has belched surfaceward, he lies dead flat against the pool’s blue-painted mooncrete bottom, motionless. Second after lengthening second slides slowly by, and still he doesn’t move.

“A weatherman who had to get above the weather!” Mom yells at Dad. “Moved us all up the gravity well so now we’ll be in the hole until we’re a hundred and fifty!”

Ten motionless seconds tick by and I begin to get worried. The water lifts Jack’s thick brown hair. Fifteen. Sways it back and forth like seaweed. Twenty.

“It’s not good for me to be around people right now,” Jack tells his supervisor at Nix Olympica before quitting.

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