Harsh Oases by Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online

their bodies. I also deal with a lot of expatriated political prisoners who have been sexually tortured. And I’ve even got a couple of women who were traumatized by their abortions.”
    This latter category of patients surprised me. I wasn’t aware that there were any more such unfortunates.
    There’s a new generation of sexually active kids who’re too young to remember the time before the “morning-after” pill. I wasn’t. I distinctly recall the excitement that followed the discovery by Professor Etienne-Emile Beaulieu, working for the French firm of Roussel-Uclaf, of RU-486, a steroid that functioned as a side-effect-free chemical abortifacient. There had been a tremendous uproar by morality watchdogs of all stripes when the pill was initially marketed, but attempting to halt its dispersal was like trying to beat back the waves. Within a few years of its release, the drug had reduced the number of yearly D&C abortions in America from millions to several thousand. The effects worldwide, except in a few theocracies, were similar. Not only had hundreds of “planned parenthood” clinics gone out of business, but so had dozens of fundamentalist sects that had capitalized on the abortion issue.
    I was impressed by Ruth’s new career. “Sony to mouth off without knowing more. It sounds like you’re making the world a better place. Unlike me.”
    “I try. But don’t knock yourself. You’re doing a useful job, and you seem happy.”
    “I guess.”
    Ruth moved away from the railing, obviously anxious to be off. “Well, it was nice to see you again, Leon.” She extended her hand, and I took it. “Don’t forget me.”
    Her hand was warm and familiar. It felt like something out of another life.
    “I couldn’t,” I said. “I won’t.”
     
    * * *
     
    That night I sat in my dark house, tense as one of the graphite cables that held undersea stations anchored to the ocean floor. Tanager had returned, but without any results. The lab we normally used—a small one in San Diego—had been unable to pin down the leaf, other than to identify some psychoactive components, so they had sent it on to a better-equipped facility, one which did a lot of work for the big government agencies such as the FBI. Knowing the stuff was some kind of drug, but not exactly what, irritated me. I was more sure than before that its presence on the island would turn out to be significant, not an accident.
    Encountering Ruth had also pulled my strings tight. Too many memories, both good and bad. I needed to relax. Drinking didn’t appeal to me. So I powered up my old Atari for a game of go.
    Go had been one of the last games to be formally modeled. More complex than chess, it had eluded encoding for decades. A fifteen-year-old prodigy from Cal Tech had finally succeeded in programming it. He had picked up a ten-thousand-dollar prize from some foundation or other, which he had used as start-up capital for his own software firm to market the game. Last I heard, he had just made the Forbes Four Hundred.
    The software needed at least one meg of main memory to run, making the Atari the first home machine that could support it. I had gotten hooked on the game when I had a lot of time on my hands during my recovery.
    As I moved the mouse around now, depositing icons of white stones on the screen (the speakers emitting a soft, realistic click with each one), trying to outflank my encoded silicon opponent, watching my stones be surrounded and go dead, I felt all the tension drain away out my fingers, leaving me as nothing but an agent of The Game, and also somehow simultaneously an inert oval counter of polished stone, which was played willy-nilly on the board, and which, when killed and removed, felt nothing at all, not remorse or grief or pain.
     
    * * *
     
    The next day I was kept too busy to think about my personal problems, or the mysterious leaf. I had to inspect the security arrangements on one of our houses, in preparation for the new