"Every human plan has a fatal 
                BUYING SILENCE                 deficiency; every perfect    
                                               marriage has an unseen,      
             by Michael C. Berch               hideous secret; every athlete
                                               or artist or general has a   
              Copyright (c)1992                hidden flaw that if struck   
                                               just so will cause them to   
                                               shatter."

Long ago, on Earth, a friend of mine bought a windscreen for his motorcycle. He had been a confirmed-helmetless, wind-in-the-face rider; one day he got tired of it and got an expensive, streamlined fairing with a built-in windscreen. When I asked him how it felt, he said the difference was amazing: it was like going from standing in a wind tunnel to floating in a space capsule. But a couple of weeks later he had it removed and it sat in the back of his garage, looking forlorn.

"I couldn't deal with it," he said. "It gives you the illusion that there's actually something protecting you from the road."

And in the same way the windscreens that I had put up around my own life turned out to be equally illusory. Money, power, intelligence, love ... all null against the forces that have twisted my life. In the end, we are all defenseless. But it happened that my internal enemy and my external enemy cancelled themselves out, and once again I float insensate in my space capsule, daring myself to live again.

It started as I sat in the darkened great hall of Vista Del Mar, my home, my prison, watching the sea of stars, waiting for my visitor from Earth. It was not much of a great hall, as great halls go; the same force that has bent my life has constrained me to live a less comfortable existence than, ceteris paribus, I could afford.

If I have learned anything in my years at Vista Del Mar it is that there is no escape from the interior flaws of the human mind: every human plan has a fatal deficiency; every perfect marriage has an unseen, hideous secret; every athlete or artist or general has a hidden flaw that if struck just so will cause them to shatter. We are no more responsible for these flaws than a slab of granite is responsible for its flecks of mica; we are born, turned in the lapidary of childhood, and cast headlong into the world like dice. Some fall and break their backs; as it happened, I landed on my feet.

My own enemy, the interior one, is that I can no longer bear the sounds of human society. Unlike the eyes, the ears cannot be turned off: even as we sleep, the ears stand guard to alert us of any intrusion. My own hearing has grown sensitive beyond all reason, and it now takes intense concentration for me to carry on a simple conversation or listen to the music I enjoyed in my youth. (There are days when even my own voice or heartbeat seem unbearable.) I have gone through all manner of earmuffs, earplugs, hypnotics, soundproof rooms, white noise, brown noise, filters, and blankers: each only seemed to intensify my frustration. When I outlived my third wife I told my property management people to clear out one of the firm's cargo stations and seal and pressurize one of the spokes. I grabbed an architect from one of our slack projects, sketched out some plans for him, named the place after my last house in California, and moved in six months later.

The generators and air exchangers float free of the station, out of my view. When I turn off the last fan at night, Vista Del Mar and I fall endlessly, silent against the backdrop of stars. I sleep, I wake, I eat, drink, work, and read, and I sleep again.

Without a doubt, my visitor comes to persuade me or coerce me to leave Vista Del Mar. That he had been able to reach me at all was frightening: it implied either that my telecom setup was not working right, or my hold on Saavedra/InterNet was not as tight as I imagined.

We are all defenseless.

There would be no point in refusing to see him. If I did, they would just send another messenger, perhaps less politely.

It had begun in my mid-thirties, during the time I was almost constantly traveling, putting together the the first set of transactions that turned my engineering firm into a global conglomerate. At first I thought it was the stress of nonstop negotiations and jet lag that made me oversensitive to noises; I remember very clearly the night in Zurich when, after two hours of sleepless tossing and turning, trying to ignore the muffled voices in the room next to mine, I called the the hotel desk and demanded that the entire floor be cleared out and rented to my firm, as well as the rooms above and below mine. After two other such incidents, it became a topic of gossip in my traveling party and later, of course, in the papers and media. After I was arrested in a New York theatre for assaulting the party in the row behind me who insisted on talking through the first two acts of Siberry's No Borders Here, my first wife finally threw up her hands and left me, complaining that she had not engaged to marry an eccentric.

I escaped criminal charges by agreeing to see a therapist, and spent the next three years on the couches of an endless series of psychiatrists, neurologists, audiologists, and after they shrugged and talked about stress and nutrition and the pressures of success, I hit the R&D circuit and spent some time with neural reprogrammers and digital biofeedback people. Nothing. Finally I saw a representative sample of faith healers, New Age practitioners, visited a couple of shrines, and gave up. During this time I also made $400 million (making not a few enemies in the process) and bought out my biggest competitor.

But it was on my fourth trip to space, on a visit to inspect the new research lab my company had built for Fujitsu Orbital, that I found what I wanted. It was just after we had transferred from the lift vessel to the shuttle that intercepts the lab's orbit; all it does is fire its chemical rocket for a couple of minutes, and then you drift for about two hours. After the engine cut off, there was no sound in the shuttle. I put a finger to my lips and smiled and my two companions nodded. We spent the remainder of the trip in blissful silence, reading and looking out the window. I filed this experience in my memory, knowing that when the time came I would have a place of refuge.

It came sooner than I thought: a couple of months later my third wife, Aletha, was driving out to our beach house to meet me for a weekend when her brakes failed on the Coast Highway and she missed a curve.

She died that night, in the hospital.

I had had a brief and unwise second marriage to a research psychologist, during my doctor-hopping days; Aletha came to me some years later, when I thought I was done with romance, and she had the good sense to know that I was not even remotely normal in any meaningful way, and not to try to treat me like I was normal. She spoke softly, and rarely, and did not expect me to speak, except for business or urgent matters. I cannot remember that she ever shouted, except when she cried out when we made love. When she died she left a terrible incompleteness in my life; though I craved silence more than my millions, I would have given anything to hear her voice again.

A week after she died, I called the architect and told him to to put together Vista Del Mar.

The visitor's name was Reid, and he was a lawyer from a big New York firm. I invited him in and realized, in spite of myself, that the threat he represented was remote and contingent (rather than personal and immediate), and I tried to relax. I even offered him a drink, which he accepted.

"I bring a proposal, Mr. Saavedra, which I hope you'll consider carefully." He spoke very softly; he'd been coached.

"Since you've come all the way out here, I'll be glad to. You understand, of course, that there is very little that you could offer that would be of interest to me."

"Perhaps so. But I'd like to go through it, just the same."

We did, and spent quite a while at it. All entrepreneurs are the same; we love to read a proposal and shake it around a little like a boxed present, to see how it rattles. It was a big enterprise; nobody but my firm would even have an outside chance of cutting the deal in the first place and getting the project completed. Put simply, it was to rebuild the central government and defense communications complex of New Persia more or less from scratch. They had been operating their major systems out of borrowed and temporary quarters since the War and the Iranian Partition, and evidently either finally got sick of it, or finally raised enough money to consider rebuilding. I'd run two major projects in Persia, one before the War and one after, and knew the right people.

"Well, it seems like a reasonable proposition. But I know you didn't call in all your markers just to try to sell me this proposal - if you'd made the proposal to my new projects people at the corporate office, or just transmitted it up here -"

Reid raised his hand. "We wanted your personal attention. This job isn't just for Saavedra/Internet; we're dealing with a very sensitive situation. I don't think the Persians will just roll over; they're looking for your familiar face, to reassure them that everything's going to go down right."

"I see. As I said, it's a most interesting proposal, but I'm afraid it would be out of the question for me to leave my home for extended travel. You're obviously aware of my personal eccentricities; please respect them."

For a moment I thought that he was not here to pry me from my home but was merely the errand-boy of somebody who wanted a piece of the action.

But he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, then stopped as he looked out the window again. "Shit," he said. "I hope you understand that I didn't plan any of this. I'm not behind it; my firm isn't behind it; hell, I don't even know what it's all about, and I probably don't want to know. The thing is, this station - S/I-14 - has been sold, and our client has made arrangements for you to relocate to another, uh, similar facility." He paused. "Assuming, of course, that you accept and perform the proposal we've discussed, and so forth."

"You're going to have to do better than that. I may be a little out of touch up here, but I'm pretty sure I still own this station. And a few others."

"It's not quite that simple. It got tangled up in some corporate stuff, like a sale/ leaseback arrangement as part of the syndication of stations 12, 14, and 15. I've checked it out; you granted a takeover option to the lead financier that could be exercised if Saavedra/Internet missed three consecutive payments to the loan retirement fund."

"Strictly a formality; they're all written like that," I said.

"Understood. The bank - I've got their name somewhere - sold the takeover rights to a Canadian company. The Canadian company, you must understand, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Blaise-Lorton."

A tendril of cold began in my chest, crept down my legs, and instinctively I shivered. Blaise-Lorton was an old enemy, and, I suppose, an unavenged enemy. We'd been in competition for years, and my firm nearly always won out. BlaiseLorton was founded by a pair of elderly Britons; they (and the firm) had been around forever, but were utterly hidebound, and we outdistanced them easily. There had been incidents over the years - anonymous threats, a couple of construction sites vandalized - but we ignored them, figuring that complaining to the police about one's competitors would not enhance the reputation of a firm noted for its discretion. One of the old boys had died a few years back, and I learned in a roundabout way that Lorton, the survivor, somehow blamed me for his partner's death.

"Okay, I'm not really pleased with that, but so what? We don't have any cash problems. Hell, we could probably pay off the whole debenture for S/I-14 today, if we had to."

Reid walked to the window and stood, looking out. His voice was almost a whisper, with a note of apology. "The loan's in default. Your firm has missed the last three payments. If you check your morning mail, you'll find that your controller and two of his people have resigned, and - according to my information - have left the country."

I started to shout that this was impossible, but the words died in my throat. Reid had not come to Vista Del Mar to bluff me. He looked at me with pity as we both came to realize that I was as much in his clients' grasp as I was in the grasp of my affliction.

He produced more papers, a more detailed look at the project. I read through them, watching Reid watch me: his face was devoid of victory. Finally I threw down the stack of papers, disgusted. "This is a completely corrupt enterprise. There's no way in hell to meet the bid price, and I don't think even Saavedra/Internet can get enough workers on-site to make the completion date."

Reid shrugged. "Not surprising. There may be some sort of political thing behind this. I have no idea. Sign the papers."

I signed, with a trembling hand.

On the trip back to Earth and my visit to the firm's headquarters, my internal enemy remained quiescent; lulled, perhaps, by the years in which I had bought silence. But I was firmly in the thrall of my human enemy, and though I briefed my staff on the proposal with relatively good cheer and vigor, it was my enemy's hands that moved my hands, and his lips that animated my smile.

Of course eyebrows were raised, but they had been raised before. Despite the abrupt departures that Reid had alluded to, I was still in control of Saavedra/Internet, and though more than once I heard the whispered word "unsound" or "unworkable" behind my back, my people pitched into the project with bold abandon. I didn't know what they knew about the sale of S/ I-14, or why I was back on Earth, and I didn't explain.

I telescoped the feasibility-study part of the project into a few quick weeks, anxious to meet the Persians and (hopefully) wind up my personal involvement in the deal and return to the "similar" accomodations in space that Reid had promised.

And as the pace of work quickened, my affliction surfaced again with a murderous vengeance. Distant conversations and snippets of music started my heart beating faster, sending out panic messages. My reaction to sound is an out of control feedback loop: fear of sound, fear of fear of sound, fear of fear of fear of sound, and so on, until the fear becomes a solid mass of panic and I find myself suddenly whiteknuckled and cowering.

Defenseless.

Even alone, on the plane to Tehran, I was tormented. Airplanes were one of my special places of respite; nearly as good as spacecraft. In each case we are separated from other humans by an interval across which sound is meaningless and impotent. I dozed lightly on the plane, hypnotized by the monotonous hum of the turbofans (though I jerked upright every time they changed timbre, knowing in my mind that the pilot was changing course or altitude, but feeling, deep down in the cerebellum somewhere, that something was wrong).

We landed, and I was met at the airport by a private car with an escort and a small entourage. I prefer to ride alone, but I could hardly refuse the hospitality of the local contractor who'd be handling the meetings with the government and key suppliers. I got off the plane and walked haltingly the few feet to the car; Earth's full gravity coupled with eight hours on the plane made me giddy. I was clapped on the back by a hearty Persian and found myself seated between two such jollies in the middle of the limousine's back seat.

My sudden intuition that there was something wrong came two or three seconds too late: suddenly my arms were pinned behind me; the jolly on my left had produced a handgun, and the one on my right was speaking rapid Farsi into a handheld radio. Terrorist kidnapping, I thought instantly, and my stomach froze. Tehran was nominally under the control of the democratic government of New Persia, but the old gangs and factions still roamed the streets. The shock of the incident and my dizziness combined; all of a sudden I couldn't feel my arms and legs, and saw the plexiglass partition in front of my face begin to swim and dissolve into a mass of phosphene dots. As the darkness pulled me under I remembered the anti-ransom statutes (which I had supported, of course) and knew that the terrorists would kill me when S/I couldn't pay...

"Good God, what have you done to him?" said a distant voice in English. I was riding in a car, probably the same car. I still couldn't move my arms, which were now handcuffed. It was dark, and I smelled dust and exhaust fumes. My head ached and there was the taste of blood in my mouth.

"He pass out." An accented voice.

"Sit him up straight. There you go."

I was yanked up and consciousness slipped away again. I heard voices, saw shapes move, felt the car stop, and start, and turn, and stop, and car doors slam, and heard more voices.

"...he has this damned acute hearing. His bloody gift."

I could see, but it was like watching a play at a great distance; there was no sense that the action had anything to do with me. We entered a building, and I was in a wheelchair, being propelled down a carpeted hall.

"...and I want the room ready now." The voice was behind me, out of sight.

"Of course, sir."

From the wheelchair to a bed, a rolling bed, a bright light, a sharp jab, and I was washed with nothingness.

How best to describe the nature of my transformation? What can I say of awakening to find Sir Harold Lorton standing over me, perspiring and trembling, smiling once and then turning sharply away? In truth, I was not as shocked to see him as I was to realize that when he spoke he made no sound, no sound at all, nor did the men and women in white coats who came in and out and silently adjusted machinery and regarded me as I lay motionless. Nor was I shocked when I learned, by means of the newswire on my office workstation, that a week later he had been found dead, a suicide, in a cheap hotel in Tehran. He must have planned it that way, or he would never have let me see his face in the hospital post-surgery ward. I remember the last thing I heard him - or anyone else, for that matter - say:

"His bloody gift."

Harold Lorton conceived of my internal enemy as a gift, and out of revenge he thought to take it away from me.

I got the last part of the package by mail, an unsigned text from one of the greyworld surgeons on Lorton's team, detailing the whole operation down to dissection of the cochlea and removal of the organ of Corti. "The work is not reversible," he notes, "but the subject should be able to return to normal life in a matter of weeks."

Normal?

I spend three hours a day in class, picking up sign language and lip-reading as fast as my instructor can teach it. BlaiseLorton seems to have collapsed, and we expect to retrieve S/I-14 without protracted litigation, but I'm moving back to California, not to space. I sleep soundly, seven hours a night, regardless of who might be in the next room or the floor above, and once again I visit friends, touch them, see them face to face, watch their children grow. Normal? Not even remotely.

Michael C. Berch is the manager of computing at a biotechnolgy software company, and is also a licensed attorney, though no longer practicing.His first published fiction was in the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE VOL. VII anthology last year, and he is currently involved in a sf writers' workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area. He splits his time between Pleasanton, Calif., and San Francisco, has 160K miles on his car, and enjoys reading, writing, travel, and cats. He can be reached at mcb@presto.ig.com or mcb@postmodern.com.