Spider Robinson
Spider Robinson began publishing SF stories in 1973, the year he moved to Canada, and was cowinner of the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in SF in 1974. By the early 1980’s, he had won the Hugo Award three times, the Nebula once, and become one of the leading reviewers of the SF field. He has written seven novels (the best known is Stardance, written in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne Robinson) and published five collections of short fiction (three of which comprise his humorous series set in Callahan’s saloon).
Robinson is a writer of wit and energy, given to puns and allusions. Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers refers to his use of dialogue and internal monologue as a style more lyric than narrative, and goes on to claim that “the lyric quality of Robinson’s SF is his means of fusing social critique with technological optimism, two themes that do not easily join in the hard SF universe.…” “User Friendly” is a fine example of Robinson’s fiction, and is perhaps his most specifically Canadian piece.
* * *
When he saw the small, weatherbeaten sign which read, “Welcome to Calais, Maine,” Sam Waterford smiled. It hurt his mouth, so he stopped.
He was tired and wired and as stiff as IRS penalties; he had been driving for … how long? He did not really know. There had been at least one entire night; he vividly remembered a succession of headlight beams coring his eyeballs at some time in the distant past. Another night was near, the sun low in the sky. It did not matter. In a few more minutes he would have reached an important point in his journey: the longest undefended border in the world. Once past it, he would start being safe again.…
He retained enough of the man he had once been to stop when he saw the Duty-Free Store. Reflex politeness: a guest, especially an unexpected one, brings a gift. But the store was closed. It occurred to him distantly that in his half-dozen trips through these parts, no matter what time he arrived, that store had always been closed. The one on the Canadian side, on the other hand, was almost always open. Too weary to wonder why, he got back into his Imperial and drove on.
He had vaguely expected to find a long line-up at the border crossing, but there was none. The guards on the American side ignored him as he drove across the short bridge, and the guards on the Canadian side waved him through. He was too weary to wonder at that, too—and distracted by the mild surge of elation that came from leaving American soil, leaving the danger zone.
It was purely subjective, of course. As he drove slowly through the streets of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, the only external reminders that he was in Canada were the speed limit signs marked in metric and the very occasional bilingual sign (French, rather than the Spanish he was used to in New York). Nonetheless, he felt as though the invisible band around his skull had been loosened a few notches. He found a Liquor Commission outlet and bought a bottle of Old Bushmill’s for Greg and Alice. A Burger King next door reminded him that he had not eaten for … however long the trip had lasted so far, so he bought something squishy and ate it and threw most of it up again a few miles later.
He drove all the rest of that evening, and long into the night, through endless miles of tree-lined highway interrupted only seldom by a village speed-trap, and once by the purely nominal border between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and he reached the city of Halifax as the sun was coming up on his left. Dimly he realized that he would shortly be drinking Old Bushmill’s and talking, and he expected both to be equally devastating to his system, so he took the trouble to find the only all-night restaurant in Halifax and tried eating again, and this time it worked. He’d had no chance to change his money, but of course the waitress was more than happy to accept Yankee currency: even allowing him a 130% exchange rate, she was making thirty-seven cents profit on each dollar. The food lifted his spirits just enough that he was able to idly admire Halifax as he drove through it, straining to remember his way. It had been many years since any city in America had looked this pleasant—the smog was barely noticeable, and the worst wino he noticed had bathed this year. As he drove past Citadel Hill he could see the Harbour, saw pleasure craft dancing on the water (along with a couple of toothless Canadian Forces destroyers and a sleek black American nuclear sub), saw birds riding the morning updrafts and heard their raucous calls. He was not, of course, in a good mood as he parked in front of Greg and Alice’s house, but he was willing to concede, in theory, that the trick was possible.
He was still quite groggy; for some reason it seemed tremendously important to knock on the precise geometrical center of Greg’s door, and maddeningly difficult to do so. When the door opened anyway it startled him. His plans stopped here; he had no idea what to do or say next.
“Sammy!” His old college buddy grinned and frowned simultaneously. “Jesus, man, it’s good to see you—or it would be if you didn’t look like death on a soda cracker! What the hell are you doing here, why didn’t you—”
“They got her, Greg. They took Marian. There’s nothing I—”
Suddenly Greg and the front of his house were gone, replaced by a ceiling, and Sam discovered that he was indoors and horizontal. “—can do,” he finished reflexively, and then realized that he must have fainted. He reached for his head, probed for soft places.
“It’s okay, Sam: I caught you as you went down. Relax.”
Sam had forgotten what the last word meant; it came through as noise. He sat up, worked his arms and legs as if by remote control. The arms hurt worse than the legs. “Got a cigarette? I ran out—” He thought for a moment. “—yesterday, I think.”
Greg handed him a twenty-five-pack of Export A. “Fill your boots. Have you eaten more recently than that?”
“Yeah. Funny—I actually forgot I smoked. Now, that’s weird.” He fumbled the pack open and lit a cigarette; his first puff turned half an inch to ash and stained the filter. “Did I drop the bottle?”
“You left it in the car.” Greg left the room, returned with two glasses of Irish whiskey. “You don’t have to talk until you’re ready.”
Sam restrained the urge to gulp. If you got too drunk, you had less control of your thoughts sometimes. “They took her. The aliens—you must have read about them up here. They appropriated her, like losing your home to municipal construction. Sorry, railroad’s coming through, we need your universe. No, not even that polite—I didn’t even get the usual ten percent of market value and a token apology.”
“Christ, Sam, I’m sorrier than I know how to say. Is she … I mean, how is she taking it?”
“Better than I would. She’s still alive.”
Greg’s face took on the expression of a man who is not sure he should be saying what he is saying, but feels compelled to anyway. “Knowing you, the way you feel about such things, I’m surprised you didn’t kill her yourself.”
“I tried. I couldn’t. You know, that may just be the worst part.”
“Ah, Sam, Sam—”
“She begged me to. And I couldn’t!”
They waited together until he could speak again. “Damn,” he said finally, “it’s good to see you.” And it would be even better to see Alice. She must be at work, designing new software to deadline.
Greg looked like he’d been missing some sleep himself. Novelists often did. “You might as well get it all out,” he said. “How did it happen?”
Sam nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Get it over with. Not a lot to tell. We were laying in bed together, watching TV. We’d … we’d just finished making love. Funny, it was better than usual. I was feeling blessed. Maybe that should have warned me or something. All of a sudden, in the middle of David Letterman’s show—do you get him up here?”
“We get all the American shows; these days, it’s about all we get. Go on.”
“Right in the middle of Stupid Pet Tricks, she just got up and left the room. I asked her to bring me back some ice water. She didn’t say anything. A few moments later I heard the front door open and close. I didn’t attach any significance to it. After five or ten minutes I called to her. I assumed she was peeing or something. When she didn’t answer I got up and went to make sure she was all right. I couldn’t find her.
“I could not figure it out. You know how it is when something just does not make sense? She wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. I’d heard the door, but she couldn’t have gone out—she was naked, barefoot, her coat and boots were still in the hall closet. I couldn’t imagine her unlocking the door for anyone we didn’t know, certainly not for someone who could snatch her out the door in two seconds without the slightest sound or struggle. I actually found myself looking under chairs for her.
“So eventually I phoned the police, and got all the satisfaction you’d expect, and called everyone we knew with no success at all, and finally I fell asleep at four A.M. hoping to God it was some kind of monstrous joke she was playing on me.
“Two government guys in suits came that night. They told me what had happened to her. Sir, your wife has been requisitioned by aliens. Quite a few people’s husbands and wives have been. And we wouldn’t do anything about it if we could, which we can’t. They were good; I never laid a hand on them. When I calmed down enough they took me to the hospital to see her. She was in pretty good shape, all things considered. Her feet were a mess, of course, from walking the streets barefoot. Exposure, fatigue. After the aliens turned her loose, she was raped by four or five people before the police found her. You remember New York at night. But they didn’t cut her up or anything, just raped her. She told me she almost didn’t mind that. She said it was a relief to be only physically raped. To be able to struggle if she wanted, even if it didn’t help. To at least have the power to protest.” He stubbed his cigarette out and finished his drink. “Strange. She was just as naked while she was possessed, but no human tried to touch her until afterward. Like, occupado, you know?”
Greg gave him his own, untouched drink. “Go on.”
“Well, God, we talked. You know, tried to talk. Mostly we cried. And then in the middle of a snuffle she chopped off short and got up out of the hospital bed and left the room. I was so mixed up it took me a good five seconds to catch on. When I did I went nuts. I tried to chase after her and catch her, and the two government guys stopped me. I broke the nose of one of them, and they wrestled me into somebody’s room and gave me a shot. As it was taking hold I turned and looked sideways out the window, just in time to catch a glimpse of her, three flights down, walking through the parking lot. Silly little hospital gown, open at the back, paper slippers. Nobody got in her way. A doctor was walking in the same direction; he was a zombie too. Masked and gloved, blood on his gloves; I hope he finished his operation first …
“She came home the next day, and we had about six hours. Long enough to say everything there was to say five times, and a bunch of other things that maybe should never have been said. This time when she left, she left dressed, with an empty bladder and money to get home with when they let her go. We had accepted it, taken the first step in starting to plan around it. Only practical, right?” He shook his head, hearing his neck crack, and finished off the second drink. It had no more effect than had the first.
“What happened then?”
“I got in the car and drove here.”
For the first time, Greg looked deeply shocked. “You left her there, to deal with it alone?”
Someone grasped Sam’s heart in impersonal hands and wrung it out. Greg must have seen the pain, and some of the accusatory tone left his voice. “Jesus wept, Sam! Look, I know you. You’ve written three entire books on brainwashing and mind-control, ‘the ultimate obscenity,’ you call it: I know how uniquely horrible the whole thing must be to you, and for you. But you’ve been married to Marian for ten years, as long as I’ve been married to Alice—how could you possibly have left her?”
The words came out like projectile vomit. “I had to, God damn it: I was scared!”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of them, for Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Scared that the thing would look out of her eyes and notice me—and decide that I looked … Useable.” He began to shudder, and found it extremely hard to stop. He lit another cigarette with shaking hands.
“Sam, it doesn’t work that way.”
“I know, I know, they told me. Who said fear has to be logical?”
Greg sat back and sighed deeply, a mournful sound. There was a silence, then, which lasted for ten seconds or more. The worst was said, and there was nothing else to say.
Finally Sam tried to distract himself with mundane trivia. “Listen, I saw the ‘No Parking’ sign where I parked, I just didn’t give a damn. If I give you my keys, will you move it for me? I don’t think I can.”
“Can’t do it,” Greg said absently. “I don’t dare. They could fine me four hundred bucks if I get caught behind the wheel of an American-registered car, you know that.”
The subject had come up on Sam’s last visit, back in 1982. Marian had been with him, then. “Sorry. I forgot.”
“Sam, what made you decide to come here?”
He discovered that he did not know. He tried to analyze it. “Well, part of it is that I needed to tell somebody the whole thing, and you and Alice are the only people on earth that love me enough. But there wasn’t even that much logic to it. I was just terrified, and I needed to get to someplace safe, and Canada was the nearest place.”
Greg burst out laughing.
Sam stared at him, scandalized. “What’s so funny?”
It took Greg quite a while to stop laughing, but when he did—despite the smile that remained on his face—Sam could see that he was very angry.
“Americans, no shit. You’re amazing. I should be used to it by now, I guess.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About you, you smug, arrogant bastard. There are nasty old aliens in the States, taking people over and using them to walk around and talk with, for mysterious purposes of their own—so what do you do? Take off for Canada, where it’ll be safe. You just assume, totally unconsciously, that the aliens will think like you. That they’d never bother with a quaint, backward, jerkwater country like Canada, The Retarded Giant On Your Doorstep! Don’t you read the papers?”
“I don’t—”
“Excuse me. Stupid of me: it probably wouldn’t make the Stateside papers, would it? You simple jackass, there are three times more Canadians hagridden than Americans! Even though you’ve got ten times the population. They came here first.”
“First? No, that can’t be, I’d have heard—”
“Why? We barely heard about it ourselves, with two out of the sixteen channels Canadian-originated. It ain’t news unless and until it happens in the friggin’ United Snakes of America!” He had more to say, but suddenly he tilted his head as if he heard something. “Hell. Stay there.” He got up and left the room hastily, muttering to himself.
Sam sat there, stunned by his old friend’s inexplicable anger. He finished his cigarette and lit another while he tried to understand it. He heard a murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, and recognized the one that wasn’t Greg’s. Alice was home from work. Perhaps she would be more sympathetic. He got up and followed the sound of the voices, and it wasn’t until he actually saw her that he remembered. Alice hadn’t worked night shift in over a year—and she had a home terminal now anyway …
She was in pretty fair shape. Face drawn with fatigue, of course, and her hair in rats. She was fully dressed except for pants and panties; there was an oil or grease stain on the side of her blouse. She tried to smile when she saw Sam.
“He caught me sitting on the john,” she said. “Hi, Sam.” She burst into tears, still trying to smile.
He thought for a crazy second that she meant her husband. But no, of course, the “he” she referred to was not Greg, but her—
—her rider. Her User …
“Oh, my dear God,” he said softly, still not quite believing. He had been so sure, so unthinkingly convinced that it would be safe here.
“Naturally the Users came here first,” Greg said with cold, bitter anger, handing his wife the slacks she had kicked off on her way out the door some hours before. “We were meant for each other, them and Canadians. Strong, superior parasites from the sky? Who just move right in and take over without asking or apologizing?” His voice began to rise in pitch and volume. “Arrogant puppetmasters who show up and start pulling your strings for you, dump you like a stolen car when they’re done with you, too powerful to fight and indifferent to your rage and shame? And your own government breaks its neck to help ’em do whatever they want, sells out without even stopping to ask the price in case it might offend ’em?” He was shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hell, man, we almost didn’t even notice the Users. We took ’em for Americans.”
Alice was dressed again now. Her voice was soft and hoarse; someone had been doing a lot of talking with her vocal cords recently. “Greg, shut up.”
“Well, dammit all, he—”
She put a hand over his mouth. “Please, my very beloved, shut your face. I can’t talk louder than you this time, my throat hurts.”
He shut up at once, put his own hand over hers and held it tightly against his face, screwing his eyes shut. She leaned against him and they put their free arms around each other; the sight made Sam want to weep like a child.
“Greg,” she said huskily, “I love you; part of me wants to cheer what you just said; many Canadians would. But you’re wrong to say it.”
“I know, baby, I know exactly the pain Sam’s going through, don’t I? That’s why I got mad at him, thinking his pain was bigger ’cause it was American. I’m sorry, Sam—”
“That’s only part of why you’re wrong. This is more important than our friendship with Sam and Marian, my love. Pay attention: you would never have said what you said if there’d been an Inuit in the room. Or a Micmac, or a French Canadian, or a Pakistani. You’d never have said it if we were standing in North Preston, talking to someone who used to live in Africville ’til they moved all the darkies out to build a bridge approach. Don’t you see, darling, everybody is a Canadian now. Everybody on Earth is now a Native People; a Frog; a Wog; a Paki; a Nigger—gradations of Niggerhood just don’t seem all that important any more.
“Gregory, some of the Users wear a human body as though it ought to have flippers, or extra legs, or wings—I saw one try to make an arm work like a tentacle, and break it. There are a lot of different races and species and genuses of User—one of the things they seem to be using Earth for is a conference table at which to work out their own hierarchy of power and intelligence and wealth. I’ve heard a lot of the palaver; they don’t bother to turn my ears off because they don’t care if I hear or not. Most of it I don’t understand even though they do use English a lot, but a few things I’ve noticed.
“If two neighboring races discover that one is vastly superior to the other in resources or wisdom or aggressiveness, they don’t spend a lot of time whining about the inequity of it all. They figure out where it looks like the water is going to wind up when it’s finished flowing downhill, and then they start looking for ways to live with that.
“I’ve never heard a User say the words, ‘It’s not fair.’ Apparently, if you can form that thought, you don’t reach the stars. The whole universe is a hierarchy of Users and Used, from the race that developed the long-distance telepathy that brought them all here, down to the cute little microorganisms that are ruthlessly butchered every day by a baby seal. We’re part of that chain, and if we can’t live with that, we’ll die.”
The three were silent for a time. Finally Sam cleared his throat. “If you two will excuse me,” he said softly, “I have to be getting back home to my wife now.”
Alice turned to him, and gave him a smile so sad and so brave that he thought his heart might break. “Sam,” she said, “that’s a storybook ending. I hope it works out that way for you. But don’t blow your brains out if it doesn’t, okay? Or hers. You write about mind-control and the institution of slavery because subversion of the human free will, loss of control, holds a special horror for you. You’re the kind that dies fighting instead. Marian isn’t. I’m not. Most humans aren’t, even though they like to feel they would be if it came to it. Maybe that’s why the Users came here.
“It may be that you and Marian can’t live together any more; I don’t know. I do know that you need twelve hours sleep and a couple of good meals before it’s safe to let you back on the highway—and Greg and I badly need someone to talk to. My User won’t be back for another ten hours or so. What would you say to some eggs and back bacon?”
Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I guess I’d say, ‘Hello there—do you mind if I use you for twelve hours or so?’” And turn you into shit in the process, he thought, but he found that he was ashamed of the thought, and that was something, at least. “Can I use your phone?”
“Only if you reverse the charges, you cheap Yankee son of a bitch,” Greg said at once, and came and hugged him hard.