Out of Touch

  Brian Stableford

  “Out of Touch” appeared in the October 1995 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Dell Harris. Brian Stableford has made many sales to the magazine since his first sale here in 1990, becoming, in fact, one of our most frequent and prolific contribu-tors throughout the decade of the nineties.

  Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Stableford has done a great deal of thinking about what a future Utopian society might be like— and what problems the people living in such a society might still have to face.

  Here, for instance, he escorts us to a rich and tranquil fu-ture society that would seem wonderful to most of us— unless we happened to be one of those unfortunate souls who were born just late enough that we were doomed to spend our lives with our noses pressed up against the glass, watching the glittering forever-young immortals on the other side… .

  Critically acclaimed British “hard science” writer Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, and the renowned trilogy consisting of The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain, and The Carnival of Destruction. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sar-donic Tales of the Genetic Revolution.

  His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Longford, The Third Millennium: A His-tory of the World AD.

  2000-3000. His most recent novel is Serpent’s Blood, which is the start of another projected trilogy. His acclaimed novella “Les Fleurs Du Mai,” an Asimov’s story, was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1994. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.

  When he’d moved the cases out on to the roadway and locked the door behind him, Jake went around to the back— or, as he’d always thought of it, the front—of the house, so that he could watch the breakers rolling up the deserted beach. The sea was on the retreat, having delivered the usual cargo of rubbish to the ragged tideline. When he and Martha had first moved into the village, there had been bits of kelp and dead crabs mixed in with the beached flotsam, but nowadays the waste was all man-made. Red plastic bottle-tops stood out like warning lights.

  While he stood there watching the dull gray waves, Peterson, the caretaker, came to say good-bye. “Your kids comin’ to pick you up?” he asked, although he knew perfectly well that they were.

  “Sam and Doreen,” Jake said, although Peterson could hardly be interested in knowing their names. “Sam’s my son. They’ve been married twenty years, but there are no grandchildren. Kids don’t seem to have kids of their own anymore.”

  “Comes of expectin’ to live forever,” Peterson said, la-conically.

  “Guess you won’t be seein’ no old people anymore. Quite a change. Never figured on endin’ up as one of an endangered species!”

  “There are old people in the cities,” Jake told him. “Lots of them.”

  “I warn’t includin’ the Third Worlders.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “Well, there won’t be lots of ‘em for long,” Peterson said, with a sigh.

  “What’d you give to have been born twenty years later, hey?”

  “I’d give a lot not to have been born thirty years sooner,” Jake countered, trying his damnedest to look on the bright side. “We missed the worst of the wars, you and I. We missed the worst of a lot of things.”

  “An’ the best of everythin’,” Peterson added, sourly. The closing of the Village had only cost the residents their so-called retirement homes, but it had cost the caretaker a living. Peterson had managed to avoid accumulating enough social credits to qualify for the full welfare hand-out—which presumably meant that he’d spent time in jail, although Jake had never asked and Martha’s gossip grape-vine had never picked up a reliable rumor—and he didn’t seem to have any kids to help him out. Who could blame the old misery for being bitter, when he had cause to be envious not merely of the younger generations, who had been granted permission to drink at the fountain of youth, but also of his own peers?

  “I’m going to miss this place,” Jake said, softly, as he heard the sound of a car drawing up out front—or out back, the way he preferred to figure it.

  “It was allus just a waiting room for the graveyard,” Peterson assured him, his voice grating like an old hinge. “Have everything you need and more where you’re goin’, includin’ ocean views.”

  I won’t have Martha, Jake thought, suffering the now-familiar pang whenever that particular thought resounded in his head. All he said out loud was: “It’s not the same when you can only see, and not touch.”

  “It’s not the same,” Jake said, while Sam’s nimble fingers ran through twenty or thirty of the most popular outlooks to which the window had access.

  “Yes, it is, Dad,” Sam said, patiently. “The image is optically perfect—parallax-shifts and everything. It’s exactly like looking through a real window, except that you have the choice of a million different windows to look through. Sure, some of them are taped and edited and some are digitally synthesized, but there are more than two hundred that are relayed live. You see exactly what you’d see if the house were really there: South Sea atolls, Alaska, the Himalayas … even fifteen fathoms deep off the Great Barrier Reef! With the remote control in your hand, you can surf the whole world. This is everywhere.”

  By way of illustration, Sam summoned the Great Barrier Reef—which, by virtue of being entirely artificial, was abundantly stocked with pretty fish and virtually litter-free. Apparently, there really were dwellings on the ocean floor, which could be picked up relatively cheaply now that the wave of fashion had passed them by.

  “It’s downtown Brownsville,” Jake insisted, stubbornly. “There’s nothing on the other side of that wall but another wall. If there really were a window cut there, there’d be nothing to see but bricks.”

  “We don’t have bricks anymore. Dad,” Sam reminded him. “The outer tegument of the house is overlaid with plates of reinforced dextrochitin.”

  “I’ll try to forget that,” Jake replied. “It makes it sound like we’re living inside a giant cockroach. The point is, Sam, that it’s not a real window. It’s a fake. You can look through, but you can’t open it to breathe the air.

  There’s nothing to touch.”

  “You can touch if you use the VR set,” Doreen put in, helpfully. “It’s only a headset and a pair of gloves, I know, but you really do get the sensation of moving through the environments, and the tactile simulators in the gloves are really very good. You don’t have the same range as the window, of course, but they’re developing so fast.. . every week there’s a dozen new scenarios available.”

  “And you don’t have to worry about the cable bill,” Sam added. “You can call up what you want when you want—no limit. Honestly, Dad, we want you to be happy here. We want you to be free.”

  “That’s the modern way of looking at things, is it?” Jake said, awkwardly conscious of the depth of his in-gratitude. “With a window and a fancy flying-helmet, you can be free, even in a prison. Anyplace is everyplace, just as long as you have the right gadgets.”

  “Hell, Dad, you had a VR set in the Village, and a cable hook-up for space-sharing. It’s not like you were living in some mud hut compared to which this is Disneyland. You’re only twenty-seven years older than I am, and you worked all your life with robots and spy-eyes. Okay, you were a hardware man, a real engineer, but you’re no dirt-farmer sucked into the twenty-first century wilderness through some time warp. You understand all this stuff just fine. We’re trying to make a home for you here and we’re doing the best we can, okay?”

  “Sure it’s okay,” Jake said, sitting down on the bed and tiredly laying out his trump card—the one they’d never be able to beat or face down.

  “After all, I’m not going to be here for long, am I?” Sam switched the window to a starry night, so dark and so very starry that it had to be on the moon. Doreen picked an invisible speck of dirt off one of the roses that were growing out of the wall around the bathroom-unit.

  They didn’t bother with the customary reassurances; they thought he was behaving too badly to deserve even that. Maybe he was, but the fact remained that although Sam was only twenty-seven years younger than his father, Sam didn’t look a day over twenty-five, and would never look any older—whereas every one of Jake’s sixty-seven years was indelibly marked on his face and his hands and his irredeemably spoiled heart.

  If he were lucky, Jake thought, he might get to occupy this plush cell for twenty or thirty years. Nobody could tell how long Sam might outlive him; perhaps a hundred years, perhaps a thousand. There was insufficient data, as yet, on which to base an estimate of the life expectancy of the eternally young, and the data was likely to remain insufficient for a very long time.

  “We’ll leave you to unpack and get settled in,” Sam said, probably as gently as he could. “You have your own dispenser, of course, but if you’d like to join us for dinner, you’d be more than welcome. We generally eat at seven-thirty. If there’s anything you need that you don’t have, you only have to ask.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, as sincerely as he could. “Thanks for everything.

  You too, Doreen.”

  “It’s okay,” Doreen said, as she followed Sam out of the door. “We do understand.”

  They thought that they did understand. They understood that he’d been set in his ways long before he went to the Village, but was set no longer now that he’d lost both Martha and the Village. They understood that he was an old man, who didn’t have their adaptability, their patience, their confidence. They understood that he was a member of a species that was soon to be extinct, who had to be treated with the utmost care and consideration and kindness. Unfortunately, that still left an awful lot to be understood.

  “I should be in a zoo” Jake whispered, so softly that no one could have heard him even if the room had been crowded. “People with windows should be tuning in to watch me. Maybe I should call Peterson and suggest that he should hire himself out as a specimen for twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. Maybe they’d pay him enough to get a window of his own, so that people all over the world could watch him peering myopically out into infinity.”

  He picked up the remote control and switched off the staring stars.

  He tried, unsuccessfully, to get a blank screen, or a brick wall, but he had to settle for a beach scene. He could tell that it wasn’t an American beach because the dark wrack marking the tideline was all sea-weed and driftwood, without a red bottle-top in sight, but he figured that it would have to do—for now.

  There wasn’t much to unpack—which was perhaps as well, given that there wasn’t a vast amount of space in which to put it. Every square meter of wall that wasn’t host to biomachinery of some kind was fitted out with cupboards and drawers, but they filled up in no time at all with clothes and antique junk. There were books and tapes and photographs and other similarly useless things: things that had been Martha’s and that she wouldn’t have wanted him to throw away; things that had been his and that Martha would have kept if she’d been here instead of him; things that were his own personal museum of the life he’d led, and that—given that he was fated to be one of the last of his kind—he felt he ought to keep.

  In the end, after some sifting and rearranging, he managed to find a place for everything. He wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a good sign or not.

  “It’s really very easy to make friends,” Doreen assured him.

  “It’s very easy to make virtual friends,” Jake corrected her.

  “The people you meet in virtual space are just as real as you are,” she said, allowing a hint of exasperation to creep into her voice, “and they can be real friends, too. Yes, you only see their simulacra, not them, but when you think about it, what do you ever see of people you meet in the flesh except the masks they put on for the sake of politeness? Really, you know, all social space is virtual space. There’s no real difference between putting your headset on and logging on to a network and putting your coat on to go walking in the neighborhood, except that the scenery’s nicer and nobody ever got mugged in virtual space.”

  Doreen and Sam both worked in virtual space. Doreen was some kind of trader dealing in futures; she made more money than Sam, who reprogrammed neurotic AIs, although his seemed more like real work to Jake. Because they both worked in virtual space, Sam and Doreen thought it entirely natural to socialize there. If they could have moved there lock, stock, and barrel, they probably would have. Jake, by contrast, always felt like a stranger in a strange land, like some Third World migrant in the Jersey Sprawl.

  “The only people who never get mugged in virtual space are the ones who never tune in to the shopping channels,” Jake told his daughter-in-law, tartly. It seemed a more pertinent comment than pointing out that hardly anyone ever got mugged in the neighborhood either because the surveillance bugs were far too good at seeing in the dark. The Third World might have come to camp on the doorstep of the First, as the newstapes were forever assuring the nervous citizens of America, but the migrants tended to steer clear of streets where they were under constant observation by thousands of electronic eyes. In any case, Brownsville had far less than its fair share of migrants. It was only just over the border, much too close to home.

  Doreen flopped down on the bed, lay supine, and threw her arms back in an exaggerated gesture of defeat.

  “Okay,” she said. “You win. If you’re that determined to be miserable, there’s absolutely nothing Sam or I can do about it. If you’re absolutely dead set on not having a moment’s pleasure between now and the moment you finally kick the bucket, nobody in the world can prevent you. But why, Jake? Why are you doing it? Is it yourself you’re intent on hurting, or are you trying to make Sam and I feel guilty about something? About what?

  About giving you a room in our house? About not getting older? Tell me, Jake—what would you have done if you’d been in Sam’s shoes? Would you have said ‘No! I won’t take the treatment unless my dear old Dad can benefit from it too’? Would you have said ‘No! I can’t insult the wrinkly old curmudgeon by inviting him to come live in my house’? Just tell me what you want, will you?”

  Jake stood over her, extending a helping hand. When she finally condescended to take it, he hauled her back to her feet—or tried to. He no longer had the strength he had once been able to take for granted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really not criticizing. I’m grateful to Sam and to you. I ought to be more cheerful, if only for your sakes, because I certainly don’t want to make you miserable. I wish I could be cheerful, but…”

  There was a long pause before she said: “But what, Jake?” She honestly didn’t know. How could she?

  “I really miss Martha,” he said, simply, knowing that it would go down better than the truth. Not that it wasn‘t true, of course. He did miss Martha. It just wasn’t the whole truth, or anything like.

  Doreen’s face softened, as he’d known it would. “I know,” she said, reaching out to hug him. He let her, because he knew how much better it would make her feel. At least she didn’t launch into a speech about life having to go on, and what Martha would have wanted.

  What Martha would have wanted, if she’d had a choice, was still to be alive. Maybe she’d have settled for a win-dow in her grave, but only as second best. She was always ready to compromise, always ready to split the difference. She’d have had an easier life if she’d married a more generous haggler than Jake had ever been.

  “I miss lots of things,” Jake added, as Doreen released him.

  “Of course you do,” she said. She could probably have made a list.

  He missed his youth, and his health, and the world in which he’d been a force to be reckoned with— inasmuch as any fairly mediocre human being could be a force to be reckoned with, in a world that had come storm-ing back from the edge of the ecocatastrophic abyss, even-tually to win the greatest prize imaginable.

  “I honestly don’t want to make friends,” he told her, when the tension seemed to have unwound and they were no longer at odds. “People kept urging me to make friends in the Village, but I wouldn’t. Martha always wanted me to be more sociable—I think she’d have been happier if her friends had been ours—but I never really saw the need, or the point. I don’t want to spend my days jabber-ing away to other old men about the past we’ve all lost but never really shared, and I certainly don’t want to while away my time playing games. I was never one for games, ever. I suppose I was never one for people, much. Martha used to say that I spent so much time with robots that I could only relate to disembodied arms and freaky hands, and then only if they weren’t working properly.”

  “That’s okay,” Doreen said. “It’s fine. Sam and I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, or anything you’re not comfortable with. But what do you want to do, Jake? What will it take to make the life you’ve got left worthwhile?”

  A miracle, he thought. Another breakthrough just like the one you got. A way not simply to put the brakes on the aging process but to throw the bastard into reverse gear, to undo the damage that’s already been done, to turn back the clock… .

  “I don’t know,” he said, truthfully. “I’m trying. It may not look like it sometimes, but I am trying.”

  “If you want to join us for dinner,” she said, “we’ll be eating about seven-thirty.”

  She and Sam always ate at about seven-thirty. There was never any possibility of either of them being late home from work, and they never had anywhere to go ex-cept the further reaches of the virtual universe.

 

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