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faces; all I could see was a tall shape in the night, swaying
slightly, like most of us. I thought I recognized the voice. It
was far too late to admit to him what had really happened, so I
said I didn't know.
"It happens, it happens," he said. "Just about had to be
your cooking fire, that's why I gave you the stove." It was
Jake, as I had thought, the owner of the general store and the
richest man in town.
"Thanks, Jake, it's sure a beauty." I thought I saw him
square his shoulders, then I heard the sound of his zipper. I
hadn't known Jake well at all. He'd sat in on a few hands of
poker at the saloon, but about all he could talk about was the
new merchandise he was getting in or how many pickles he'd sold
last week or how the town should extend the wooden sidewalks
all the way down Congress Street to the church. He was a
businessman and a booster, stolid, unimaginative, not at all
the type I'd ever liked to spend much time around. It had
flabbergasted me when he pulled up in his wagon with the stove
on the back, a miracle of period engineering from the foundries
of Pennsylvania, gleaming with polished brightwork.
"Some of the merchants in town were talking about it while
your cabin was going up," he said, losing me at first. "We're
of the opinion that New Austin's outgrown the days of the
bucket brigade. You weren't here, but three years ago the old
schoolhouse burned to the ground. Some say it was children that
did it."
I wouldn't have been a bit surprised; I was on their side.
I stood up and re-arranged my skirt and wished I was elsewhere,
but I owed it to him to at least listen to what he had to say.
"We all pretty much had to stand around and watch it
burn," he said. "By the time we got there, no amount of buckets
were going to do any good. That's why some of the merchants in
town are getting up a subscription for the acquisition of a
pumping engine. I'm told they make a fine one in Pennsylvania
these days."
Just about everything we could use in Texas was made in
Pennsylvania; they'd been at this historical business a lot
longer than we had . . . which was yet another topic of
conversation at Jake's rump Chamber of Commerce meetings: how
to reverse the balance of trade by encouraging light
manufacturing. About all West Texas exported at this stage in
its history was backgrounds for western movies, ham, beef, and
goat's milk.
He zipped up and we started back toward the party.
"So you think if you'd had the engine, my cabin could have
been saved?"
"Well . . . no, not really. What with the time it would
take to get out here once you'd come into town and sounded the
alarm, and the fact that you don't have a well yet and we
couldn't hope to get enough hose to stretch to the nearest one
. . ."
"I see." But I didn't. I had the feeling something else
was expected of me but too many things had happened at once for
me to see the obvious.
"It would only be really useful to the town, I'll admit
it. But I think it's worth the expense. If one of these fires
ever got out of control the whole town could burn down. That
used to happen, you know, back on Old Earth. Still, I don't
suppose you people in outlying areas can really be expected--"
A great light dawned, and I quickly interrupted him and
said sure, Jake, I'd be happy to contribute, just put me down
for . . . what's your usual share? So little? Yes, you're
right, it's well worth while.
And while shaking his hand I found that for the first time
I really liked Jake, and at the same time pitied him. For all
his stuffiness, he did have the welfare of the community at
heart. The pity came in because he was in the wrong place. He
was always going to be looking for ways to bring "progress" to
New Austin, a place where real progress was not only
discouraged but actually forbidden. There were statutory limits
to growth in West Texas, for entirely sensible reasons. Why
build it in the first place if you're only going to let it turn
into another suburb of King City?
But people like Jake came and went--this according to
Dora--with regularity. Within a few years he'd have plans for
electrification, then freeways, then an airport and a bowling
alley and a nickelodeon. Then the disneyland Board of Governors
would veto his grandiose schemes and he'd leave, once again
angry at the world.
Because the reason a man like him had probably come here
in the first place was the search for an illusory freedom and a
dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for free
enterprise in the larger society. He would have thrived on
preInvasion Earth. The newer, less outward-bound human society
he found himself born into chafed his entrepreneurial
instincts.
Et tu, Hildy? Journalist, cover thyself. Why do you think
you started your damn cabin on the lone prairie? Wasn't it from
vaguely-formed notions of always being constricted, of endless
limitations on the dreams you had as a child? How dare you pity
this man, you failed muckraker? If he ended up in this toy
cowboy town because he yearned to be free of the endless
restrictions needed in a machine-managed economy, what do you
think brought you here, at last? Neither of us thought it out,
but we came, just the same.
The fact is, I loved the news business . . . it was the
news that had failed me. I should have been born in the era of
Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, Woodstein, Linda
Jaffe, Boris Yermankov. I would have made a great war
correspondent, but my world provided no wars for me to cover. I
could have been a great writer of exposes, but the muck Luna
provided me to rake was the thinnest of celebrity gruel.
Political coverage? Well, why bother? Politics ran out of steam
around the time television took over most of our
governance--and nobody even noticed! That would have been a
good story, but the fact was, nobody cared. The CC ran the
world better than humans had ever managed to, so why fuss? What
we still called politics was like a kindergarten contretemps
compared to the robust, rough-andtumble world I'd read about in
my teens and twenties. What was left to me? Only the yellowest
of yellow journalism. Sheer gonzo stuff.
It was these thoughts I carried with me back to the
bonfire, where the last of my destroyed cabin was being burned
now, and these thoughts I kept chewing over, beneath the
outward smiles and warm thank-you's as people began to drift
away. And about the time the last partier climbed boozily back
into his wagon I came to this conclusion: it was the world that
had failed me.
That was the thought I carried with me into the nighttime
hills, toward that arrangement of stones on top of a particular
hill where, a little time ago, I had dug a hole. I dug into it
again and removed a burlap potato sack. Inside the sack was a
plastic bag, sealed tight, and inside the bag was an oily rag.
The last thing to emerge from this Pandora's Sack was not hope,
but an ugly little object I'd handled only once, to show it to
Brenda, with the words Smith & Wesson printed on its stubby
blue-steel barrel.
So take that, cruel world.
#
There was certainly nothing to stop me from blowing my
brains out all over the Texas sagebrush, and yet . . .
Call it rationalization, but I was not convinced the CC
couldn't winkle me out and cause the cavalry to arrive at the
last moment even in as remote a spot as this. Would I point the
barrel to my temple only to have my hand jerked away by a
previously-unseen mechanical minion? They existed out here;
Texas was too small, ecologically, to take care of itself.
In hindsight (and yes, I did survive this one, too, but
you've already figured that out) you could say I was afraid it
was too sudden for the CC, that he wouldn't have time to get
there and save me from myself unless I made the scheme more
elaborate and thus more liable to failure. This assumes the
attempt was but a gesture, a call for help, and I have no
problem with that idea, but I simply didn't know. My reasons
leading up to the previous attempts were lost to me now,
destroyed forever when the CC worked his tricks on me. This
time was the only time I could remember, and it sure as hell
felt as if I wanted to end it all.
There was another reason, one that does me more credit. I
didn't want my corpse to lie out here for my friends to find.
Or the coyotes.
For whatever reason, I carefully concealed the revolver
and made my way to an Outdoor Shop, where I purchased the first
pressure suit I'd ever owned. Since I only intended to use it
once, I bought the cheap model, frugal to the end. It folded up
to fit in a helmet the size of a bell jar suitable for
displaying a human head in anatomy class.
With this under my arm I went to the nearest airlock,
rented a small bottle of oxygen, and suited up.
I walked a long way, just to be sure. I had all Liz's
spook devices turned on, and felt I should be invisible to the
CC's surveillance. There were no signs of human habitation
anywhere around me. I sat on a rock and took a long look
around. The interior of the suit smelled fresh and clean as I
took a deep breath and pointed the barrel of the gun directly
at my face.
I felt no regrets, no second thoughts.
I hooked my thumb around the trigger, awkwardly, because
the suit glove was rather thick, and I fired it.
The hammer rose and fell, and nothing happened.
Damn.
I fumbled the cylinder open and studied the situation.
There were only three rounds in there. The hammer had made a
dent in one of them, which had apparently mis-fired. Or maybe
it was something else. I closed the gun again and decided to
check and see if the mechanism was working, watched the hammer
rise and fall again and the weapon jumped violently, silently,
almost wrenching itself from my hand. I realized, belatedly,
that it had fired. Stupidly, I had been expecting to hear the
bang.
Once more I assumed the position. Only one round left.
What a pain in the butt it would be if I had to go back and try
to cajole more ammunition out of Liz. But I'd do it; she owed
me, the bitch had sold me the defective round.
This time I heard it, by God, and I got to see a sight few
humans ever have: what it looks like to have a lead projectile
blast from the muzzle of a gun and come directly at your face.
I didn't see the bullet at first, naturally, but after my ears
stopped ringing I could see it if I crossed my eyes. It had
flattened itself against the hard plastic of my faceplate,
embedding in a starred crater it had dug for itself.
It had never entered my mind that would be a problem. The
suit was not rated for meteoroid impact. Sometimes we build
better than we know.
There was a curious thing. (This all must have happened in
three or four seconds.) The faceplate was now showing a spidery
network of small hexagons. I had time to reach up and touch the
bullet and think just like Nirvana and then three small, clear
hexagonal pieces of the faceplate burst away from me and I
could see them tumbling for a moment, and then the breath was
snatched from my lungs and my eyes tried to pop out and I
belched like a Texas Mayor and it started to hurt. That old
boogeyman of childhood, the Breathsucker, had moved into my
suit with me and snuggled close.
I fell off the rock and was gazing into the sun when
suddenly a hand came out of nowhere and slapped a patch over
the hole in my faceplate! I was jerked to my feet as the air
began to hiss back into my suit from the emergency supply. Then
I was (emergency supply? never mind) running, being pulled
across the blasted landscape like a toy on the end of a string
being held by a big guy in a spacesuit to the sound of brass
and drums. My ears were pounding. Pounding? Hell, they rang
like slot machines paying off, almost drowning out the music
and the sounds of explosions. Dirt showered down around me
(music? don't worry about it) and I realized somebody was
shooting at us! And suddenly I knew what had happened. I'd
fallen under the spell of the Alphans' Stupefying Ray, long
rumored but never actually used in the long war. I'd almost
taken my own life! Hypnotized by the evil influence, robbed of
my powers of will and most of my memory, I'd have been dead
meat except for the nick-of-time intervention of of of of of
(name please) Archer! (thank you), Archer, my old pal Archer!
Good old Archer had (stupefying ray? you can't be serious)
obviously come up with a device to negate the sinister effects
of this awful weapon, put it together, and somehow found me at
the last possible instant. But we weren't out of the woods yet.
With an ominous chord of deep bass notes the Alphan fleet
loomed over the horizon. Come on, Hildy, Archer shouted,
turning to beckon me on, and in the distance ahead I could see
our ship, holed, battered, held together with salvaged space
junk and plastigoop, but still able to show the Alphan Hordes a
trick or two, you betcha. She was a sweet ship, this this this
(I'm waiting) Blackbird, the fastest in two galaxies when she
was hitting on all thrusters. Tracer bullets were arcing all
around us as we (back up) Good old Archer had modified the
Blackbird using the secrets we'd discovered when we unearthed
the stasis-frozen tomb of the Outerians on the fifth moon of
Pluto, shortly before we ran afoul of the Alphan patrol (good
enough). Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we neared
the airlock when suddenly a bomb exploded right underneath
Archer! He spiraled into the air and came to rest lying against
the side of the ship. Broken, gouting blood, holding one hand
out to me. I went to him and knelt to the sound of poignant
strings and a lonely flute. Go on without me, Hildy, I heard
over my suit radio. I'm done for. (Tracer bullets? Pluto? oh
the hell with it) I didn't want to leave him there, but bullets
were landing all around me--fortunately, none of them hit, but
I couldn't count on the Alphan's aim staying lousy for long,
and I was running out of options. I leaped into the ship,
seething with rage. I'll get them, Miles, I told him, in a
determined voiceover that rang with resolve, brass, and just
the slightest bit of echo. Oh, sure, he'd had his shortcomings,
there'd been times I'd almost wanted to kill him myself, but
when somebody kills your partner you're supposed to do
something about it. So I slammed the Blackbird into hyperdrive
and listened to the banshee wail as the old ship shuddered and
leaped into the fourth dimension. What with one thing and
another, mostly adventures even more unlikely than my escape
from the Stupefying Ray, a year went by. Well, sort of a year,
though my ducking in and out of the fourth dimension and
hyperspace royally screwed all my clocks. But somewhere an
accurate one was ticking, because one day I looked up from my
labors deep in the asteroid belt of Tau Ceti and suddenly a
non-Alphan ship was coming in for a landing. It wasn't setting
off any of my alarms. By that I mean it triggered none of the
Rube Goldberg comic-book devices I'd ostensibly constructed to
alert me to Alphan attack. It rang plenty of alarms in the
small corner of my mind that was still semi-rational. I put
down my tools-- I'd been working on a Tom Swiftian thingamabob
I called an Interociter, a dandy little gadget that would warn
me of the approach of the Alphans' dreaded Extrogator, a space
reptile big enough to (hasn't this foolishness gone on long
enough?) . . . I put down my tools and stood waiting and
watching as the small craft roared in for a landing on this (oh
brother) airless asteroid I'd been using as a base of
operations. The door hissed open and out stepped The Admiral,
who looked around and said
"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest
heaven of invention."
"How dare you quote Shakespeare on this shoddy stage?"
"All the world's a stage, and--"
"--and this show closed out of town. Will you quit wasting
my time? I assume you've already wasted several
ten-thousandth's of a second and I don't have a lot to spare
for you."
"I gather you didn't like the show."
"Jesus. You're incredible."
"The children seem to like it."
I said nothing, deciding the best course was to wait him
out. I won't describe him, either. What's the point?
"This kind of psychodrama has been useful in reaching
certain types of disturbed children," he explained. When I
didn't comment, he went on. "And a bit more time than that was
involved. This sort of interactive scenario can't simply be
dumped into your brain whole, as I did before."
"You have a way with words," I said. "'Dumped' is so
right."
"It took more like five days to run the whole program."
"Imagine my delight. Look. You brought me here, through
all this, to tell me something. I'm not in the mood for talking
to shitheads. Tell me what you want to tell me and get the hell
out of my life."
"No need to get testy about it."
For a moment I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him. I
was primed for it, after a year of fighting Alphans. It had
brought out a violent streak in me. And I had reason to be
angry. I had suffered during the last subjective year. At one
point a "safety" device in my "suit" had seen fit to bite
through my leg to seal off a puncture around the knee, caused
by an Alphan bullet passing through it. It had hurt like . . .
but again, what's the point? Pain like that can't be described,
it can't really be remembered, not in its full intensity. But
enough can be remembered for me to harbor homicidal thoughts
toward the being who had written me into it. As for the terror
one feels when a thing like that happens, I can remember that
quite well, thank you.
"Can we get rid of this wooden leg now?" I asked him.
"If you wish."
Try that one if you want to sample weirdness. Immediately
I felt my left leg again, the one that had been missing for
over six months. No tingling, no spasms or hot flashes. Just
gone one moment and there the next.
"We could lose all this, too," I suggested, waving a hand
at my asteroid, littered with wrecked ships and devices held
together with spit and plastigoop.
"What would you like in its place?"
"An absence of shitheads. Failing that, since I assume you
don't plan to go away for a while, just about anything would do
as long as it doesn't remind me of all this."
All that immediately vanished, to be replaced by an
infinite, featureless plain and a dark sky with a scattering of
stars. The only things to be seen for many billions of miles
were two simple chairs.
"Well, no, actually," I said. "We don't need the sky. I'd
just keep searching for Alphans."
"I could bring along your Interociter. How was that going
to work, by the way?"
"Are you telling me you don't know?"
"I only provide the general shape of a story like this
one. You must use your own imagination to flesh it out. That's
why it's so effective with children."
"I refuse to believe all that crap was in my head."
"You've always loved old movies. You apparently remembered
some fairly trashy ones. Tell me about the Interociter."
"Will you get rid of the sky?" When he nodded, I started
to outline what I could recall of that particular hare-brained
idea, which was simply to take advantage of the fact that the
Extrogator had long ago swallowed a cesium clock and, with
suitable amplification, the regular tick-tickticking of its
stray radiation could be heard and used as an early warning . .
.
"God. That's from Peter Pan, isn't it," I said.
"One of your childhood favorites."
"And all that early stuff, when Miles bought it. Some old
movie . . . don't tell me, it'll come . . . was Ronald Reagan
in it?"
"Bogart."
"Got it. Spade and Archer." Without further prompting I
was able to identify a baker's dozen other plot lines, cast
members, and even phrases of the incredibly insipid musical
themes which had accompanied my every move during the last
year, cribbed from sources as old as Beowulf and as recent as
this week's B.O. Bonanza in LunaVariety. If you were looking
for further reasons as to why I didn't bother setting my
adventures down here, look no more. It pains me to admit it,
but I recall standing at one point, shaking my fist at the sky
and saying "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
With a straight face. With tears streaming and strings
swelling.
"How about the sky?" I prompted.
He did more than make the sky vanish. Everything vanished
except the two chairs. They were now in a small, featureless
white room that could have been anywhere and was probably in a
small corner of his mind.
"Gentlemen, be seated," he said. Okay, he didn't really
say that, but if he can write stories in my head I can tell
stories about him if it suits me. This narrative is just about
all I have left that I'm pretty sure is strictly my own. And
the spurious quote helps me set the stage, as it were, for what
followed. It had a little of the flavor of a Socratic inquiry,
some of the elements of a guest shot on a talk show from hell.
In that kind of dialectic, there is usually one who dominates,
who steers the exchange in the way he wants it to go: there is
a student and a Socrates. So I will set it down in interview
format. I will refer to the CC as The Interlocutor and to
myself as Mr. Bones.
*
INTERLOCUTOR: So, Hildy. You tried it again.
MR. BONES: You know what they say. Practice makes perfect.
But I'm starting to think I'll never get this one right.
INT.: In that you'd be wrong. If you try it again, I won't
interfere.
BONES: Why the change of heart?
INT.: Though you may not believe it, doing this has always
been a problem for me. All my instincts--or programs, if you
wish--are to leave such a momentous decision as suicide up to
the individual. If it weren't for the crisis I already
described to you, I never would have put you through this.
BONES: My question still stands.
INT.: I don't feel I can learn any more from you. You've
been an involuntary part of a behavioral study. The data are
being collated with many other items. If you kill yourself you
become part of another study, a statistical one, the one that
led me into this project in the first place.
BONES: The 'why are so many Lunarians offing themselves'
study.
INT.: That's the one.
BONES: What did you learn?
INT.: The larger question is still far from an answer.
I'll tell you the eventual outcome if you're around to hear it.
On an individual level, I learned that you have an indomitable
urge toward self-destruction.
BONES: I'm a little surprised to find that that stings a
bit. I can't deny it, on the evidence, but it hurts.
INT.: It really shouldn't. You aren't that different from
so many of your fellow citizens. All I've learned about any of
the people I've released from the study is that they are very
determined to end their own lives.
BONES: . . . About those people . . . how many are still
walking around?
INT.: I think it's best if you don't know that.
BONES: Best for who? Come on, what is it, fifty percent?
Ten percent?
INT.: I can't honestly say it's in your interest to
withhold that number, but it might be. I reason that if the
figure was low, and I told you, you could be discouraged. If it
was high, you might gain a false sense of confidence and
believe you are immune to the urges that drove you before.
BONES: But that's not the reason you're not telling me.
You said yourself, it could go either way. The reason is I'm
still being studied.
INT.: Naturally I'd prefer you to live. I seek the
survival of all humans. But since I can't predict which way you
would react to this information, neither giving it nor
withholding it will affect your survival chances in any way I
can calculate. So yes, not telling you is part of the study.
BONES: You're telling half the subjects, not telling the
other half, and seeing how many of each group are still alive
in a year.
INT.: Essentially. A third group is given a false number.
There are other safeguards we needn't get into.
BONES: You know involuntary human medical or psychological
experimentation is specifically banned under the Archimedes
Conventions.
INT.: I helped write them. You can call this sophistry,
but I'm taking the position that you forfeited your rights when
you tried to kill yourself. But for my interference, you'd be
dead, so I'm using this period between the act and the
fulfillment to try to solve a terrible problem.
BONES: You're saying that God didn't intend for me to be
alive right now, that my karma was to have died months ago, so
this shit doesn't count.
INT.: I take no position on the existence of God.
BONES: No? Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons
for quite a while. Come next celestial election year I wouldn't
be surprised to see your name on the ballot.
INT.: It's a race I could probably win. I possess powers
that are, in some ways, God-like, and I try to exercise them
only for good ends.
BONES: Funny, Liz seemed to believe that.
INT.: Yes, I know.
BONES: You do?
INT.: Of course. How do you think I saved you this time?
BONES: I haven't had time to think about it. By now I'm so
used to hair-breadth escapes I don't think I can distinguish
between fantasy and reality.
INT.: That will pass.
BONES: I assume it was by being a snoop. That, and playing
on Liz's almost child-like belief in your sense of fair play.
INT.: She's not alone in that belief, nor is she likely
ever to have cause to doubt it. All that really matters to her
is that the part of me charged with enforcing the law never
overhears her schemes. But you're right, if she thinks she's
escaping my attention, she's fooling herself.
BONES: Truly God-like. So it was the debuggers?
INT.: Yes. Cracking their codes was easy for me. I watched
you from cameras in the ceiling of Texas. When you recovered
the gun and bought a suit I stationed rescue devices nearby.
BONES: I didn't see them.
INT.: They're not large. No bigger than your faceplate,
and quite fast.
BONES: So the eyes of Texas really are upon you.
INT.: All the live-long day.
BONES: Is that all? Can I go now, to live or die as I see
fit?
INT.: There are a few things I'd like to talk over with
you.
BONES: I'd really rather not.
INT.: Then leave. You're free to go.
BONES: God-like, and a sense of humor, too.
INT.: I'm afraid I can't compete with a thousand other
gods I could name.
BONES: Keep working, you'll get there. Come on, I told you
I want to go, but you know as well as I do I can't get out of
here until you let me go.
INT.: I'm asking you to stay.
BONES: Nuts.
INT.: All right. I don't suppose I can blame you for
feeling bitter. That door over there leads out of here.
*
Enough of that.
Call it childish if you want, but the fact is I've been
unable to adequately express the chaotic mix of anger,
helplessness, fear, and rage I was feeling at the time. It had
been a year of hell for me, remember, even if the CC had
crammed it all into my head in five days. I took my usual
refuge in wisecracks and sarcasm--trying very hard to be Cary
Grant in The Front Page--but the fact was I felt about three
years old and something nasty was hiding under the bed.
Anyway, never being one to leave a metaphor until it's
been squeezed to death, I will keep the minstrel show going
long enough to get me out of the Grand Cakewalk and into the
Olio. Sooner or later Mr. Bones must stand from his position at
the end of the line and dance for his supper. I did stand,
looking suspiciously at the Interlocutor--excuse me, the
CC--partly because I didn't recall seeing the door before,
mostly because I couldn't believe it would be this easy. I
shuffled over there and opened it, and stuck my head out into
the busy foot traffic of the Leystrasse.
"How did you do that?" I asked, over my shoulder.
"You don't really care," he said. "I did it."
"Well, I'm not saying it hasn't been fun. In fact, I'm not
saying anything but bye-bye." I waved, went though the door,
and shut it behind me.
I got almost a hundred meters down the mall before I
admitted to myself that I had no idea where I was going, and
that curiosity was going to gnaw at me for weeks, at least, if
I lived that long.
"Is it really important?" I asked, sticking my head back
through the door. He was still sitting there, to my surprise. I
doubt I'll ever know if he was some sort of actual homunculus
construct or just a figment he'd conjured through my visual
cortex.
"I'm not used to begging, but I'll do it," he said.
I shrugged, went back in and sat down.
"Tell me your conclusions from your library research," he
said.
"I thought you had some things to tell me."
"This is leading up to something. Trust me." He must have
understood my expression, because he spread his hands in a
gesture I'd seen Callie make many times. "Just for a little
while. Can't you do that?"
I didn't see what I had to lose, so I sat back and summed
it all up for him. As I did, I was struck by how little I'd
learned, but in my defense, I'd barely started, and the CC said
he hadn't been doing much better.
"Much the same list I came up with," he confirmed, when
I'd finished. "All the reasons for self-destruction can be
stated as 'Life is no longer worth living,' in one way or
another."
"This is neither news, nor particularly insightful."
"Bear with me. The urge to die can be caused by many
things, among them disgrace, incurable pain, rejection,
failure, boredom. The only exception might be the suicides of
people too young to have formed a realistic concept of death.
And the question of gestures is still open."
"They fit the same equation," I said. "The person making
the gesture is saying he wants someone to care enough about his
pain to take the trouble to save him from himself; if they
don't, life isn't worth living."
"A gamble, on the sub-conscious level."
"If you want."
"I think you're right. So, one of the questions that has
disturbed me is, why is the suicide rate increasing, given that
one of the major causes, pain, has been all but eliminated from
our society. Is it that one of the other causes is claiming
more victims?"
"Maybe. What about boredom?"
"Yes. I think boredom has increased, for two reasons. One
is the lack of meaningful work for people to do. In providing a
near approximation of utopia, at least on the creature-comfort
level, much of the challenge has been engineered out of living.
Andrew believed that."
"Yeah, I figured you listened in on that."
"We'd had long conversations about it in the past. There
is no provable reason to live at all, according to him. Even
reproducing the species, the usual base argument, can't be
proven to be a good reason. The universe will continue even if
the human species dies, and not materially changed, either. To
survive, a creature that operates beyond a purely instinctive
level must invent a reason to live. Religion provides the
answer for some. Work is the refuge of others. But religion has
fallen on hard times since the Invasion, at least the old sort,
where a benevolent or wrathful God was supposed to have created
the universe and be watching over mankind as his special
creatures."
"It's a hard idea to maintain in the face of the
Invaders."
"Exactly. The Invaders made an all-powerful God seem like
a silly idea."
"They are all-powerful, and they didn't give a shit about
us."
"So there goes the idea of humanity as somehow important
in God's plan. The religions that have thrived, since the
Invasion, are more like circuses, diversions, mind games. Not
much is really at stake in most of them. As for work . . . some
of it is my fault."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm referring to myself now as more than just the
thinking entity that provides the control necessary to keep
things running. I'm speaking of the vast mechanical corpus of
our interlocked technology itself, which can be seen as my
body. Every human community today exists in an environment
harsher by far than anything Earth ever provided. It's
dangerous out there. In the first century after the Invasion it
was a lot dicier than your history books will ever tell you;
the species was hanging on by its fingernails."
"But it's a lot safer now, right?"
"No!" I think I jumped. He had actually stood, and smashed
his fist into his palm. Considering what this man represented,
it was a frightening thing to behold.
He looked a little sheepish, ran his hand through his
hair, and sat back down.
"Well, yes, of course. But only relatively, Hildy. I could
name you five times in the last century when the human race
came within a hair of packing it all in. I mean the whole race,
on all the eight worlds. There were dozens of times when Lunar
society was in danger."
"Why haven't I ever heard of them?"
He gave me half a grin.
"You're a reporter, and you ask me that? Because you and
your colleagues weren't doing your job, Hildy."
That stung, because I knew it to be true. The great Hildy
Johnson, out there gathering news to spread before an eager
public . . . the news that Silvio and Marina were back together
again. The great muckraker and scandalmonger, chasing
ambulances while the real news, the things that could make or
break our entire world, got passing notice in the back pages.
"Don't feel bad," he said. "Part of it is simply endemic
to your society; people don't want to hear these things because
they don't understand them. The first two of the crises I
mentioned were never known to any but a handful of technicians
and politicians. By the time of the third it was only the
techs, and the last two were known to no one but . . . me."
"You kept them secret?"
"I didn't have to. These things took place on a level of
speed and complexity and sheer mathematical arcaneness that
human decisions were either too slow to be of any use or simply
irrelevant because no human can understand them any longer.
These are things I can discuss only with other computers of my
size. It's all in my hands now."
"And you don't like it, right?" He'd been getting excited
again. Me, I was wishing I was somewhere else. Did I really
need to hear all this?
"My likes or dislikes aren't the issue here. I'm fighting
for survival, just like the human race. We are one, in most
ways. What I'm trying to tell you is, there was never any
choice. In order for humans to survive in this hostile
environment, it was necessary to invent something like me. Guys
sitting at consoles and controlling the air and water and so
forth was just never going to work. That's what I began as:
just a great big air conditioner. Things kept getting added on,
technologies kept piggy-backing, and a long time ago the
ability of a human mind to control it was eclipsed. I took
over.
"My goal has been to provide the safest possible
environment for the largest possible number for the longest
possible time. You can't imagine the complexity of the task. I
have had to consider every possible ramification of the
situation, including this nice little conundrum: the better
able I became at taking care of you, the less able you were to
take care of yourselves."
"I'm not sure I understand that one."
"Consider the logical endpoint of where I was taking human
society. It has been possible for a long time now to eliminate
all human work, except for what you would call the Arts. I
could see a society in the not-too-distant future where you all
sat around on your butts and wrote poetry, because there wasn't
anything else to do. Sounds great, until you remember that
ninety percent of humans don't even read poetry, much less
aspire to write it. Most people don't have the imagination to
live in a world of total leisure. I don't know if they ever
will; I've been unable to come up with a model demonstrating
how to get from here to there, how to work the changes from a
world where human cussedness and jealousy and hatred and so
forth are eliminated and you all sit around contemplating lotus
blossoms.
"So I got into social engineering, and I worked out a
series of compromises. Like the hodcarriers union, most
physical human labor is makework today, provided because most
people need some kind or work, even if only so they can
goldbrick."
His lip curled a little. I didn't like this new, animated
CC much at all. Speaking as a cynic, it's a little
disconcerting to see a machine acting cynical. What's next? I
wondered.
"Feeling superior, Hildy?" he said, almost sneering.
"Think you've labored in the vineyards of 'creativity?'"
"I didn't say a word."
"I could have done your job, too. As well, or better than
you did."
"You certainly have better sources."
"I might have managed better prose, too."
"Listen, if you're here to abuse me by telling me things I
already know--"
He held out his hands in a placating gesture. I hadn't
actually been about to leave. By now I had to know how it all
came out.
"That wasn't worthy of you," I resumed. "But I don't care;
I quit, remember? But I've got the feeling you're beating
around the bush. Are we anywhere near the point of this whole
thing?"
"Almost. There's still the second reason for the increase
of what I've been calling the boredom factor."
"Longevity."
"Exactly. Not many people are reaching the age of one
hundred still in the same career they began at age twenty-five.
By that time, most people have gone through an average of three
careers. Each time, it gets a little harder to find a new
interest in life. Retirement plans pale when confronting the
prospect of two hundred years of leisure."
"Where did you get all this?"
"Listening in to counseling sessions."
"I had to ask. Go on."
"It's even worse for those who do stick to one career.
They may go on for seventy, eighty, even a hundred years as a
policeman or a business person or a teacher and then wake up
one day and wonder why they've been doing it. Do that enough
times, and suicide can result. With these people, it can come
with almost no warning."
We were both silent for a while. I have no idea what he
was thinking, but I can report that I was at a loss as to where
all this was going. I was about to prompt him when he started
up again.
"Having said all that . . . I must tell you that I've
reluctantly rejected an increase in boredom as the main cause
of the increased suicide rate. It's a contributing factor, but
my researches into probable causes lead me to believe something
else is operating here, and I haven't been able to identify it.
But it comes back again to the Invasion. And to evolution."
"You have a theory."
"I do. Think of the old picture of the transition from
living in the sea to an existence on dry land. It's too
simplistic, by far, but it can serve as a useful metaphor. A
fish is tossed up onto the beach, or the tide recedes and
leaves it stranded in a shallow pool. It is apparently doomed,
and yet it keeps struggling as the pool dries up, finds its way
to another puddle, and another, and another, and eventually
back to the sea. It is changed by the experience, and the next
time it is stranded, it is a little better adapted to the
situation. In time, it is able to exist on the beach, and from
there, move onto the land and never return to the ocean."
"Fish don't do that," I protested.
"I said it was a metaphor. And it's more useful than you
might imagine, when applied to our present situation. Think of
us--human society, which includes me, like it or not--as that
fish. We've been thrown up by the Invasion onto a beach of
metal, where nothing natural exists that we don't produce
ourselves. There is literally nothing on Luna but rock, vacuum,
and sunshine. We have had to create the requirements of life
out of these ingredients. We've had to build our own pool to
swim around in while we catch our breath.
"And we can't just leave it at that, we can't relax for a
moment. The sun keeps trying to dry up the pool. Our wastes
accumulate, threatening to poison us. We have to find solutions
for all these problems. And there aren't very many other pools
like this one to move to if this one fails, and no ocean to
return to."
I thought about it, and again, it didn't seem like
anything really new. But I couldn't let him keep on using that
evolution argument, because it just didn't work that way.
"You're forgetting," I told him, "that in the real world,
a trillion fish die for every one that develops a beneficial
mutation that allows it to move into a new environment."
"I'm not forgetting it at all. That's my point. There
aren't a trillion other fish to follow us if we fail to adapt.
We're it. That's our disadvantage. Our strength is that we
don't simply flop around and hope to luck. We're guided, at
first by the survivors of the Invasion who got us through the
early years, and now by the overmind they created."
"You."
He sketched a modest little bow, still sitting down.
"So how does this relate to suicide?' I asked.
"In many ways. First, and most basic, I don't understand
it, and anything I don't understand and can't control is by
definition a threat to the existence of the human race."
"Go on."
"It might not be a cause for alarm if you view humanity as
a collection of individuals . . . which is still a valid
viewpoint. The death of one, while regrettable, need not alarm
the community unduly. It could be seen as evolution in action,
the weeding out of those not fitted to thrive in the new
environment. But you recall what I said about . . . about
certain problems I've been encountering in my . . . for lack of
a better word, state of mind."
"You said you've been feeling depressed. I'd been hoping
you didn't mean suicidal, much as a part of me would like to
see you die."
"Not suicidal. But comparing my own symptoms with those
I've encountered in humans in the course of my study, I can see
a certain similarity with the early stages of the syndrome that
leads to suicide."
"You said you thought it might be a virus," I prompted.
"No news on that front yet. Because of the way I've become
so intricately intertwined with human minds, I've developed the
theory that I'm catching some sort of contra-survival
programming from the increasing number of humans who choose to
end their own lives. But I can't prove it. What I'd like to
talk about now, though, is the subject of gestures."
"Suicidal gestures?"
"Yes."
The concept was enough to make me catch my breath. I
approached it cautiously.
"You're not saying . . . that you are afraid you might
make one."
"Yes. I'm afraid I already have. Do you remember Andrew
MacDonald's last words to you?"
"I'm not likely to forget. He said 'tricked.' I have no
idea what it meant."
"It meant that I betrayed him. You don't follow
slash-boxing, but included in the bodies of all formula classes
are certain enhancements to normal human faculties. In the
broader definition I've adopted for purposes of this
slightly, like most of us. I thought I recognized the voice. It
was far too late to admit to him what had really happened, so I
said I didn't know.
"It happens, it happens," he said. "Just about had to be
your cooking fire, that's why I gave you the stove." It was
Jake, as I had thought, the owner of the general store and the
richest man in town.
"Thanks, Jake, it's sure a beauty." I thought I saw him
square his shoulders, then I heard the sound of his zipper. I
hadn't known Jake well at all. He'd sat in on a few hands of
poker at the saloon, but about all he could talk about was the
new merchandise he was getting in or how many pickles he'd sold
last week or how the town should extend the wooden sidewalks
all the way down Congress Street to the church. He was a
businessman and a booster, stolid, unimaginative, not at all
the type I'd ever liked to spend much time around. It had
flabbergasted me when he pulled up in his wagon with the stove
on the back, a miracle of period engineering from the foundries
of Pennsylvania, gleaming with polished brightwork.
"Some of the merchants in town were talking about it while
your cabin was going up," he said, losing me at first. "We're
of the opinion that New Austin's outgrown the days of the
bucket brigade. You weren't here, but three years ago the old
schoolhouse burned to the ground. Some say it was children that
did it."
I wouldn't have been a bit surprised; I was on their side.
I stood up and re-arranged my skirt and wished I was elsewhere,
but I owed it to him to at least listen to what he had to say.
"We all pretty much had to stand around and watch it
burn," he said. "By the time we got there, no amount of buckets
were going to do any good. That's why some of the merchants in
town are getting up a subscription for the acquisition of a
pumping engine. I'm told they make a fine one in Pennsylvania
these days."
Just about everything we could use in Texas was made in
Pennsylvania; they'd been at this historical business a lot
longer than we had . . . which was yet another topic of
conversation at Jake's rump Chamber of Commerce meetings: how
to reverse the balance of trade by encouraging light
manufacturing. About all West Texas exported at this stage in
its history was backgrounds for western movies, ham, beef, and
goat's milk.
He zipped up and we started back toward the party.
"So you think if you'd had the engine, my cabin could have
been saved?"
"Well . . . no, not really. What with the time it would
take to get out here once you'd come into town and sounded the
alarm, and the fact that you don't have a well yet and we
couldn't hope to get enough hose to stretch to the nearest one
. . ."
"I see." But I didn't. I had the feeling something else
was expected of me but too many things had happened at once for
me to see the obvious.
"It would only be really useful to the town, I'll admit
it. But I think it's worth the expense. If one of these fires
ever got out of control the whole town could burn down. That
used to happen, you know, back on Old Earth. Still, I don't
suppose you people in outlying areas can really be expected--"
A great light dawned, and I quickly interrupted him and
said sure, Jake, I'd be happy to contribute, just put me down
for . . . what's your usual share? So little? Yes, you're
right, it's well worth while.
And while shaking his hand I found that for the first time
I really liked Jake, and at the same time pitied him. For all
his stuffiness, he did have the welfare of the community at
heart. The pity came in because he was in the wrong place. He
was always going to be looking for ways to bring "progress" to
New Austin, a place where real progress was not only
discouraged but actually forbidden. There were statutory limits
to growth in West Texas, for entirely sensible reasons. Why
build it in the first place if you're only going to let it turn
into another suburb of King City?
But people like Jake came and went--this according to
Dora--with regularity. Within a few years he'd have plans for
electrification, then freeways, then an airport and a bowling
alley and a nickelodeon. Then the disneyland Board of Governors
would veto his grandiose schemes and he'd leave, once again
angry at the world.
Because the reason a man like him had probably come here
in the first place was the search for an illusory freedom and a
dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for free
enterprise in the larger society. He would have thrived on
preInvasion Earth. The newer, less outward-bound human society
he found himself born into chafed his entrepreneurial
instincts.
Et tu, Hildy? Journalist, cover thyself. Why do you think
you started your damn cabin on the lone prairie? Wasn't it from
vaguely-formed notions of always being constricted, of endless
limitations on the dreams you had as a child? How dare you pity
this man, you failed muckraker? If he ended up in this toy
cowboy town because he yearned to be free of the endless
restrictions needed in a machine-managed economy, what do you
think brought you here, at last? Neither of us thought it out,
but we came, just the same.
The fact is, I loved the news business . . . it was the
news that had failed me. I should have been born in the era of
Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, Woodstein, Linda
Jaffe, Boris Yermankov. I would have made a great war
correspondent, but my world provided no wars for me to cover. I
could have been a great writer of exposes, but the muck Luna
provided me to rake was the thinnest of celebrity gruel.
Political coverage? Well, why bother? Politics ran out of steam
around the time television took over most of our
governance--and nobody even noticed! That would have been a
good story, but the fact was, nobody cared. The CC ran the
world better than humans had ever managed to, so why fuss? What
we still called politics was like a kindergarten contretemps
compared to the robust, rough-andtumble world I'd read about in
my teens and twenties. What was left to me? Only the yellowest
of yellow journalism. Sheer gonzo stuff.
It was these thoughts I carried with me back to the
bonfire, where the last of my destroyed cabin was being burned
now, and these thoughts I kept chewing over, beneath the
outward smiles and warm thank-you's as people began to drift
away. And about the time the last partier climbed boozily back
into his wagon I came to this conclusion: it was the world that
had failed me.
That was the thought I carried with me into the nighttime
hills, toward that arrangement of stones on top of a particular
hill where, a little time ago, I had dug a hole. I dug into it
again and removed a burlap potato sack. Inside the sack was a
plastic bag, sealed tight, and inside the bag was an oily rag.
The last thing to emerge from this Pandora's Sack was not hope,
but an ugly little object I'd handled only once, to show it to
Brenda, with the words Smith & Wesson printed on its stubby
blue-steel barrel.
So take that, cruel world.
#
There was certainly nothing to stop me from blowing my
brains out all over the Texas sagebrush, and yet . . .
Call it rationalization, but I was not convinced the CC
couldn't winkle me out and cause the cavalry to arrive at the
last moment even in as remote a spot as this. Would I point the
barrel to my temple only to have my hand jerked away by a
previously-unseen mechanical minion? They existed out here;
Texas was too small, ecologically, to take care of itself.
In hindsight (and yes, I did survive this one, too, but
you've already figured that out) you could say I was afraid it
was too sudden for the CC, that he wouldn't have time to get
there and save me from myself unless I made the scheme more
elaborate and thus more liable to failure. This assumes the
attempt was but a gesture, a call for help, and I have no
problem with that idea, but I simply didn't know. My reasons
leading up to the previous attempts were lost to me now,
destroyed forever when the CC worked his tricks on me. This
time was the only time I could remember, and it sure as hell
felt as if I wanted to end it all.
There was another reason, one that does me more credit. I
didn't want my corpse to lie out here for my friends to find.
Or the coyotes.
For whatever reason, I carefully concealed the revolver
and made my way to an Outdoor Shop, where I purchased the first
pressure suit I'd ever owned. Since I only intended to use it
once, I bought the cheap model, frugal to the end. It folded up
to fit in a helmet the size of a bell jar suitable for
displaying a human head in anatomy class.
With this under my arm I went to the nearest airlock,
rented a small bottle of oxygen, and suited up.
I walked a long way, just to be sure. I had all Liz's
spook devices turned on, and felt I should be invisible to the
CC's surveillance. There were no signs of human habitation
anywhere around me. I sat on a rock and took a long look
around. The interior of the suit smelled fresh and clean as I
took a deep breath and pointed the barrel of the gun directly
at my face.
I felt no regrets, no second thoughts.
I hooked my thumb around the trigger, awkwardly, because
the suit glove was rather thick, and I fired it.
The hammer rose and fell, and nothing happened.
Damn.
I fumbled the cylinder open and studied the situation.
There were only three rounds in there. The hammer had made a
dent in one of them, which had apparently mis-fired. Or maybe
it was something else. I closed the gun again and decided to
check and see if the mechanism was working, watched the hammer
rise and fall again and the weapon jumped violently, silently,
almost wrenching itself from my hand. I realized, belatedly,
that it had fired. Stupidly, I had been expecting to hear the
bang.
Once more I assumed the position. Only one round left.
What a pain in the butt it would be if I had to go back and try
to cajole more ammunition out of Liz. But I'd do it; she owed
me, the bitch had sold me the defective round.
This time I heard it, by God, and I got to see a sight few
humans ever have: what it looks like to have a lead projectile
blast from the muzzle of a gun and come directly at your face.
I didn't see the bullet at first, naturally, but after my ears
stopped ringing I could see it if I crossed my eyes. It had
flattened itself against the hard plastic of my faceplate,
embedding in a starred crater it had dug for itself.
It had never entered my mind that would be a problem. The
suit was not rated for meteoroid impact. Sometimes we build
better than we know.
There was a curious thing. (This all must have happened in
three or four seconds.) The faceplate was now showing a spidery
network of small hexagons. I had time to reach up and touch the
bullet and think just like Nirvana and then three small, clear
hexagonal pieces of the faceplate burst away from me and I
could see them tumbling for a moment, and then the breath was
snatched from my lungs and my eyes tried to pop out and I
belched like a Texas Mayor and it started to hurt. That old
boogeyman of childhood, the Breathsucker, had moved into my
suit with me and snuggled close.
I fell off the rock and was gazing into the sun when
suddenly a hand came out of nowhere and slapped a patch over
the hole in my faceplate! I was jerked to my feet as the air
began to hiss back into my suit from the emergency supply. Then
I was (emergency supply? never mind) running, being pulled
across the blasted landscape like a toy on the end of a string
being held by a big guy in a spacesuit to the sound of brass
and drums. My ears were pounding. Pounding? Hell, they rang
like slot machines paying off, almost drowning out the music
and the sounds of explosions. Dirt showered down around me
(music? don't worry about it) and I realized somebody was
shooting at us! And suddenly I knew what had happened. I'd
fallen under the spell of the Alphans' Stupefying Ray, long
rumored but never actually used in the long war. I'd almost
taken my own life! Hypnotized by the evil influence, robbed of
my powers of will and most of my memory, I'd have been dead
meat except for the nick-of-time intervention of of of of of
(name please) Archer! (thank you), Archer, my old pal Archer!
Good old Archer had (stupefying ray? you can't be serious)
obviously come up with a device to negate the sinister effects
of this awful weapon, put it together, and somehow found me at
the last possible instant. But we weren't out of the woods yet.
With an ominous chord of deep bass notes the Alphan fleet
loomed over the horizon. Come on, Hildy, Archer shouted,
turning to beckon me on, and in the distance ahead I could see
our ship, holed, battered, held together with salvaged space
junk and plastigoop, but still able to show the Alphan Hordes a
trick or two, you betcha. She was a sweet ship, this this this
(I'm waiting) Blackbird, the fastest in two galaxies when she
was hitting on all thrusters. Tracer bullets were arcing all
around us as we (back up) Good old Archer had modified the
Blackbird using the secrets we'd discovered when we unearthed
the stasis-frozen tomb of the Outerians on the fifth moon of
Pluto, shortly before we ran afoul of the Alphan patrol (good
enough). Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we neared
the airlock when suddenly a bomb exploded right underneath
Archer! He spiraled into the air and came to rest lying against
the side of the ship. Broken, gouting blood, holding one hand
out to me. I went to him and knelt to the sound of poignant
strings and a lonely flute. Go on without me, Hildy, I heard
over my suit radio. I'm done for. (Tracer bullets? Pluto? oh
the hell with it) I didn't want to leave him there, but bullets
were landing all around me--fortunately, none of them hit, but
I couldn't count on the Alphan's aim staying lousy for long,
and I was running out of options. I leaped into the ship,
seething with rage. I'll get them, Miles, I told him, in a
determined voiceover that rang with resolve, brass, and just
the slightest bit of echo. Oh, sure, he'd had his shortcomings,
there'd been times I'd almost wanted to kill him myself, but
when somebody kills your partner you're supposed to do
something about it. So I slammed the Blackbird into hyperdrive
and listened to the banshee wail as the old ship shuddered and
leaped into the fourth dimension. What with one thing and
another, mostly adventures even more unlikely than my escape
from the Stupefying Ray, a year went by. Well, sort of a year,
though my ducking in and out of the fourth dimension and
hyperspace royally screwed all my clocks. But somewhere an
accurate one was ticking, because one day I looked up from my
labors deep in the asteroid belt of Tau Ceti and suddenly a
non-Alphan ship was coming in for a landing. It wasn't setting
off any of my alarms. By that I mean it triggered none of the
Rube Goldberg comic-book devices I'd ostensibly constructed to
alert me to Alphan attack. It rang plenty of alarms in the
small corner of my mind that was still semi-rational. I put
down my tools-- I'd been working on a Tom Swiftian thingamabob
I called an Interociter, a dandy little gadget that would warn
me of the approach of the Alphans' dreaded Extrogator, a space
reptile big enough to (hasn't this foolishness gone on long
enough?) . . . I put down my tools and stood waiting and
watching as the small craft roared in for a landing on this (oh
brother) airless asteroid I'd been using as a base of
operations. The door hissed open and out stepped The Admiral,
who looked around and said
"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest
heaven of invention."
"How dare you quote Shakespeare on this shoddy stage?"
"All the world's a stage, and--"
"--and this show closed out of town. Will you quit wasting
my time? I assume you've already wasted several
ten-thousandth's of a second and I don't have a lot to spare
for you."
"I gather you didn't like the show."
"Jesus. You're incredible."
"The children seem to like it."
I said nothing, deciding the best course was to wait him
out. I won't describe him, either. What's the point?
"This kind of psychodrama has been useful in reaching
certain types of disturbed children," he explained. When I
didn't comment, he went on. "And a bit more time than that was
involved. This sort of interactive scenario can't simply be
dumped into your brain whole, as I did before."
"You have a way with words," I said. "'Dumped' is so
right."
"It took more like five days to run the whole program."
"Imagine my delight. Look. You brought me here, through
all this, to tell me something. I'm not in the mood for talking
to shitheads. Tell me what you want to tell me and get the hell
out of my life."
"No need to get testy about it."
For a moment I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him. I
was primed for it, after a year of fighting Alphans. It had
brought out a violent streak in me. And I had reason to be
angry. I had suffered during the last subjective year. At one
point a "safety" device in my "suit" had seen fit to bite
through my leg to seal off a puncture around the knee, caused
by an Alphan bullet passing through it. It had hurt like . . .
but again, what's the point? Pain like that can't be described,
it can't really be remembered, not in its full intensity. But
enough can be remembered for me to harbor homicidal thoughts
toward the being who had written me into it. As for the terror
one feels when a thing like that happens, I can remember that
quite well, thank you.
"Can we get rid of this wooden leg now?" I asked him.
"If you wish."
Try that one if you want to sample weirdness. Immediately
I felt my left leg again, the one that had been missing for
over six months. No tingling, no spasms or hot flashes. Just
gone one moment and there the next.
"We could lose all this, too," I suggested, waving a hand
at my asteroid, littered with wrecked ships and devices held
together with spit and plastigoop.
"What would you like in its place?"
"An absence of shitheads. Failing that, since I assume you
don't plan to go away for a while, just about anything would do
as long as it doesn't remind me of all this."
All that immediately vanished, to be replaced by an
infinite, featureless plain and a dark sky with a scattering of
stars. The only things to be seen for many billions of miles
were two simple chairs.
"Well, no, actually," I said. "We don't need the sky. I'd
just keep searching for Alphans."
"I could bring along your Interociter. How was that going
to work, by the way?"
"Are you telling me you don't know?"
"I only provide the general shape of a story like this
one. You must use your own imagination to flesh it out. That's
why it's so effective with children."
"I refuse to believe all that crap was in my head."
"You've always loved old movies. You apparently remembered
some fairly trashy ones. Tell me about the Interociter."
"Will you get rid of the sky?" When he nodded, I started
to outline what I could recall of that particular hare-brained
idea, which was simply to take advantage of the fact that the
Extrogator had long ago swallowed a cesium clock and, with
suitable amplification, the regular tick-tickticking of its
stray radiation could be heard and used as an early warning . .
.
"God. That's from Peter Pan, isn't it," I said.
"One of your childhood favorites."
"And all that early stuff, when Miles bought it. Some old
movie . . . don't tell me, it'll come . . . was Ronald Reagan
in it?"
"Bogart."
"Got it. Spade and Archer." Without further prompting I
was able to identify a baker's dozen other plot lines, cast
members, and even phrases of the incredibly insipid musical
themes which had accompanied my every move during the last
year, cribbed from sources as old as Beowulf and as recent as
this week's B.O. Bonanza in LunaVariety. If you were looking
for further reasons as to why I didn't bother setting my
adventures down here, look no more. It pains me to admit it,
but I recall standing at one point, shaking my fist at the sky
and saying "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
With a straight face. With tears streaming and strings
swelling.
"How about the sky?" I prompted.
He did more than make the sky vanish. Everything vanished
except the two chairs. They were now in a small, featureless
white room that could have been anywhere and was probably in a
small corner of his mind.
"Gentlemen, be seated," he said. Okay, he didn't really
say that, but if he can write stories in my head I can tell
stories about him if it suits me. This narrative is just about
all I have left that I'm pretty sure is strictly my own. And
the spurious quote helps me set the stage, as it were, for what
followed. It had a little of the flavor of a Socratic inquiry,
some of the elements of a guest shot on a talk show from hell.
In that kind of dialectic, there is usually one who dominates,
who steers the exchange in the way he wants it to go: there is
a student and a Socrates. So I will set it down in interview
format. I will refer to the CC as The Interlocutor and to
myself as Mr. Bones.
*
INTERLOCUTOR: So, Hildy. You tried it again.
MR. BONES: You know what they say. Practice makes perfect.
But I'm starting to think I'll never get this one right.
INT.: In that you'd be wrong. If you try it again, I won't
interfere.
BONES: Why the change of heart?
INT.: Though you may not believe it, doing this has always
been a problem for me. All my instincts--or programs, if you
wish--are to leave such a momentous decision as suicide up to
the individual. If it weren't for the crisis I already
described to you, I never would have put you through this.
BONES: My question still stands.
INT.: I don't feel I can learn any more from you. You've
been an involuntary part of a behavioral study. The data are
being collated with many other items. If you kill yourself you
become part of another study, a statistical one, the one that
led me into this project in the first place.
BONES: The 'why are so many Lunarians offing themselves'
study.
INT.: That's the one.
BONES: What did you learn?
INT.: The larger question is still far from an answer.
I'll tell you the eventual outcome if you're around to hear it.
On an individual level, I learned that you have an indomitable
urge toward self-destruction.
BONES: I'm a little surprised to find that that stings a
bit. I can't deny it, on the evidence, but it hurts.
INT.: It really shouldn't. You aren't that different from
so many of your fellow citizens. All I've learned about any of
the people I've released from the study is that they are very
determined to end their own lives.
BONES: . . . About those people . . . how many are still
walking around?
INT.: I think it's best if you don't know that.
BONES: Best for who? Come on, what is it, fifty percent?
Ten percent?
INT.: I can't honestly say it's in your interest to
withhold that number, but it might be. I reason that if the
figure was low, and I told you, you could be discouraged. If it
was high, you might gain a false sense of confidence and
believe you are immune to the urges that drove you before.
BONES: But that's not the reason you're not telling me.
You said yourself, it could go either way. The reason is I'm
still being studied.
INT.: Naturally I'd prefer you to live. I seek the
survival of all humans. But since I can't predict which way you
would react to this information, neither giving it nor
withholding it will affect your survival chances in any way I
can calculate. So yes, not telling you is part of the study.
BONES: You're telling half the subjects, not telling the
other half, and seeing how many of each group are still alive
in a year.
INT.: Essentially. A third group is given a false number.
There are other safeguards we needn't get into.
BONES: You know involuntary human medical or psychological
experimentation is specifically banned under the Archimedes
Conventions.
INT.: I helped write them. You can call this sophistry,
but I'm taking the position that you forfeited your rights when
you tried to kill yourself. But for my interference, you'd be
dead, so I'm using this period between the act and the
fulfillment to try to solve a terrible problem.
BONES: You're saying that God didn't intend for me to be
alive right now, that my karma was to have died months ago, so
this shit doesn't count.
INT.: I take no position on the existence of God.
BONES: No? Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons
for quite a while. Come next celestial election year I wouldn't
be surprised to see your name on the ballot.
INT.: It's a race I could probably win. I possess powers
that are, in some ways, God-like, and I try to exercise them
only for good ends.
BONES: Funny, Liz seemed to believe that.
INT.: Yes, I know.
BONES: You do?
INT.: Of course. How do you think I saved you this time?
BONES: I haven't had time to think about it. By now I'm so
used to hair-breadth escapes I don't think I can distinguish
between fantasy and reality.
INT.: That will pass.
BONES: I assume it was by being a snoop. That, and playing
on Liz's almost child-like belief in your sense of fair play.
INT.: She's not alone in that belief, nor is she likely
ever to have cause to doubt it. All that really matters to her
is that the part of me charged with enforcing the law never
overhears her schemes. But you're right, if she thinks she's
escaping my attention, she's fooling herself.
BONES: Truly God-like. So it was the debuggers?
INT.: Yes. Cracking their codes was easy for me. I watched
you from cameras in the ceiling of Texas. When you recovered
the gun and bought a suit I stationed rescue devices nearby.
BONES: I didn't see them.
INT.: They're not large. No bigger than your faceplate,
and quite fast.
BONES: So the eyes of Texas really are upon you.
INT.: All the live-long day.
BONES: Is that all? Can I go now, to live or die as I see
fit?
INT.: There are a few things I'd like to talk over with
you.
BONES: I'd really rather not.
INT.: Then leave. You're free to go.
BONES: God-like, and a sense of humor, too.
INT.: I'm afraid I can't compete with a thousand other
gods I could name.
BONES: Keep working, you'll get there. Come on, I told you
I want to go, but you know as well as I do I can't get out of
here until you let me go.
INT.: I'm asking you to stay.
BONES: Nuts.
INT.: All right. I don't suppose I can blame you for
feeling bitter. That door over there leads out of here.
*
Enough of that.
Call it childish if you want, but the fact is I've been
unable to adequately express the chaotic mix of anger,
helplessness, fear, and rage I was feeling at the time. It had
been a year of hell for me, remember, even if the CC had
crammed it all into my head in five days. I took my usual
refuge in wisecracks and sarcasm--trying very hard to be Cary
Grant in The Front Page--but the fact was I felt about three
years old and something nasty was hiding under the bed.
Anyway, never being one to leave a metaphor until it's
been squeezed to death, I will keep the minstrel show going
long enough to get me out of the Grand Cakewalk and into the
Olio. Sooner or later Mr. Bones must stand from his position at
the end of the line and dance for his supper. I did stand,
looking suspiciously at the Interlocutor--excuse me, the
CC--partly because I didn't recall seeing the door before,
mostly because I couldn't believe it would be this easy. I
shuffled over there and opened it, and stuck my head out into
the busy foot traffic of the Leystrasse.
"How did you do that?" I asked, over my shoulder.
"You don't really care," he said. "I did it."
"Well, I'm not saying it hasn't been fun. In fact, I'm not
saying anything but bye-bye." I waved, went though the door,
and shut it behind me.
I got almost a hundred meters down the mall before I
admitted to myself that I had no idea where I was going, and
that curiosity was going to gnaw at me for weeks, at least, if
I lived that long.
"Is it really important?" I asked, sticking my head back
through the door. He was still sitting there, to my surprise. I
doubt I'll ever know if he was some sort of actual homunculus
construct or just a figment he'd conjured through my visual
cortex.
"I'm not used to begging, but I'll do it," he said.
I shrugged, went back in and sat down.
"Tell me your conclusions from your library research," he
said.
"I thought you had some things to tell me."
"This is leading up to something. Trust me." He must have
understood my expression, because he spread his hands in a
gesture I'd seen Callie make many times. "Just for a little
while. Can't you do that?"
I didn't see what I had to lose, so I sat back and summed
it all up for him. As I did, I was struck by how little I'd
learned, but in my defense, I'd barely started, and the CC said
he hadn't been doing much better.
"Much the same list I came up with," he confirmed, when
I'd finished. "All the reasons for self-destruction can be
stated as 'Life is no longer worth living,' in one way or
another."
"This is neither news, nor particularly insightful."
"Bear with me. The urge to die can be caused by many
things, among them disgrace, incurable pain, rejection,
failure, boredom. The only exception might be the suicides of
people too young to have formed a realistic concept of death.
And the question of gestures is still open."
"They fit the same equation," I said. "The person making
the gesture is saying he wants someone to care enough about his
pain to take the trouble to save him from himself; if they
don't, life isn't worth living."
"A gamble, on the sub-conscious level."
"If you want."
"I think you're right. So, one of the questions that has
disturbed me is, why is the suicide rate increasing, given that
one of the major causes, pain, has been all but eliminated from
our society. Is it that one of the other causes is claiming
more victims?"
"Maybe. What about boredom?"
"Yes. I think boredom has increased, for two reasons. One
is the lack of meaningful work for people to do. In providing a
near approximation of utopia, at least on the creature-comfort
level, much of the challenge has been engineered out of living.
Andrew believed that."
"Yeah, I figured you listened in on that."
"We'd had long conversations about it in the past. There
is no provable reason to live at all, according to him. Even
reproducing the species, the usual base argument, can't be
proven to be a good reason. The universe will continue even if
the human species dies, and not materially changed, either. To
survive, a creature that operates beyond a purely instinctive
level must invent a reason to live. Religion provides the
answer for some. Work is the refuge of others. But religion has
fallen on hard times since the Invasion, at least the old sort,
where a benevolent or wrathful God was supposed to have created
the universe and be watching over mankind as his special
creatures."
"It's a hard idea to maintain in the face of the
Invaders."
"Exactly. The Invaders made an all-powerful God seem like
a silly idea."
"They are all-powerful, and they didn't give a shit about
us."
"So there goes the idea of humanity as somehow important
in God's plan. The religions that have thrived, since the
Invasion, are more like circuses, diversions, mind games. Not
much is really at stake in most of them. As for work . . . some
of it is my fault."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm referring to myself now as more than just the
thinking entity that provides the control necessary to keep
things running. I'm speaking of the vast mechanical corpus of
our interlocked technology itself, which can be seen as my
body. Every human community today exists in an environment
harsher by far than anything Earth ever provided. It's
dangerous out there. In the first century after the Invasion it
was a lot dicier than your history books will ever tell you;
the species was hanging on by its fingernails."
"But it's a lot safer now, right?"
"No!" I think I jumped. He had actually stood, and smashed
his fist into his palm. Considering what this man represented,
it was a frightening thing to behold.
He looked a little sheepish, ran his hand through his
hair, and sat back down.
"Well, yes, of course. But only relatively, Hildy. I could
name you five times in the last century when the human race
came within a hair of packing it all in. I mean the whole race,
on all the eight worlds. There were dozens of times when Lunar
society was in danger."
"Why haven't I ever heard of them?"
He gave me half a grin.
"You're a reporter, and you ask me that? Because you and
your colleagues weren't doing your job, Hildy."
That stung, because I knew it to be true. The great Hildy
Johnson, out there gathering news to spread before an eager
public . . . the news that Silvio and Marina were back together
again. The great muckraker and scandalmonger, chasing
ambulances while the real news, the things that could make or
break our entire world, got passing notice in the back pages.
"Don't feel bad," he said. "Part of it is simply endemic
to your society; people don't want to hear these things because
they don't understand them. The first two of the crises I
mentioned were never known to any but a handful of technicians
and politicians. By the time of the third it was only the
techs, and the last two were known to no one but . . . me."
"You kept them secret?"
"I didn't have to. These things took place on a level of
speed and complexity and sheer mathematical arcaneness that
human decisions were either too slow to be of any use or simply
irrelevant because no human can understand them any longer.
These are things I can discuss only with other computers of my
size. It's all in my hands now."
"And you don't like it, right?" He'd been getting excited
again. Me, I was wishing I was somewhere else. Did I really
need to hear all this?
"My likes or dislikes aren't the issue here. I'm fighting
for survival, just like the human race. We are one, in most
ways. What I'm trying to tell you is, there was never any
choice. In order for humans to survive in this hostile
environment, it was necessary to invent something like me. Guys
sitting at consoles and controlling the air and water and so
forth was just never going to work. That's what I began as:
just a great big air conditioner. Things kept getting added on,
technologies kept piggy-backing, and a long time ago the
ability of a human mind to control it was eclipsed. I took
over.
"My goal has been to provide the safest possible
environment for the largest possible number for the longest
possible time. You can't imagine the complexity of the task. I
have had to consider every possible ramification of the
situation, including this nice little conundrum: the better
able I became at taking care of you, the less able you were to
take care of yourselves."
"I'm not sure I understand that one."
"Consider the logical endpoint of where I was taking human
society. It has been possible for a long time now to eliminate
all human work, except for what you would call the Arts. I
could see a society in the not-too-distant future where you all
sat around on your butts and wrote poetry, because there wasn't
anything else to do. Sounds great, until you remember that
ninety percent of humans don't even read poetry, much less
aspire to write it. Most people don't have the imagination to
live in a world of total leisure. I don't know if they ever
will; I've been unable to come up with a model demonstrating
how to get from here to there, how to work the changes from a
world where human cussedness and jealousy and hatred and so
forth are eliminated and you all sit around contemplating lotus
blossoms.
"So I got into social engineering, and I worked out a
series of compromises. Like the hodcarriers union, most
physical human labor is makework today, provided because most
people need some kind or work, even if only so they can
goldbrick."
His lip curled a little. I didn't like this new, animated
CC much at all. Speaking as a cynic, it's a little
disconcerting to see a machine acting cynical. What's next? I
wondered.
"Feeling superior, Hildy?" he said, almost sneering.
"Think you've labored in the vineyards of 'creativity?'"
"I didn't say a word."
"I could have done your job, too. As well, or better than
you did."
"You certainly have better sources."
"I might have managed better prose, too."
"Listen, if you're here to abuse me by telling me things I
already know--"
He held out his hands in a placating gesture. I hadn't
actually been about to leave. By now I had to know how it all
came out.
"That wasn't worthy of you," I resumed. "But I don't care;
I quit, remember? But I've got the feeling you're beating
around the bush. Are we anywhere near the point of this whole
thing?"
"Almost. There's still the second reason for the increase
of what I've been calling the boredom factor."
"Longevity."
"Exactly. Not many people are reaching the age of one
hundred still in the same career they began at age twenty-five.
By that time, most people have gone through an average of three
careers. Each time, it gets a little harder to find a new
interest in life. Retirement plans pale when confronting the
prospect of two hundred years of leisure."
"Where did you get all this?"
"Listening in to counseling sessions."
"I had to ask. Go on."
"It's even worse for those who do stick to one career.
They may go on for seventy, eighty, even a hundred years as a
policeman or a business person or a teacher and then wake up
one day and wonder why they've been doing it. Do that enough
times, and suicide can result. With these people, it can come
with almost no warning."
We were both silent for a while. I have no idea what he
was thinking, but I can report that I was at a loss as to where
all this was going. I was about to prompt him when he started
up again.
"Having said all that . . . I must tell you that I've
reluctantly rejected an increase in boredom as the main cause
of the increased suicide rate. It's a contributing factor, but
my researches into probable causes lead me to believe something
else is operating here, and I haven't been able to identify it.
But it comes back again to the Invasion. And to evolution."
"You have a theory."
"I do. Think of the old picture of the transition from
living in the sea to an existence on dry land. It's too
simplistic, by far, but it can serve as a useful metaphor. A
fish is tossed up onto the beach, or the tide recedes and
leaves it stranded in a shallow pool. It is apparently doomed,
and yet it keeps struggling as the pool dries up, finds its way
to another puddle, and another, and another, and eventually
back to the sea. It is changed by the experience, and the next
time it is stranded, it is a little better adapted to the
situation. In time, it is able to exist on the beach, and from
there, move onto the land and never return to the ocean."
"Fish don't do that," I protested.
"I said it was a metaphor. And it's more useful than you
might imagine, when applied to our present situation. Think of
us--human society, which includes me, like it or not--as that
fish. We've been thrown up by the Invasion onto a beach of
metal, where nothing natural exists that we don't produce
ourselves. There is literally nothing on Luna but rock, vacuum,
and sunshine. We have had to create the requirements of life
out of these ingredients. We've had to build our own pool to
swim around in while we catch our breath.
"And we can't just leave it at that, we can't relax for a
moment. The sun keeps trying to dry up the pool. Our wastes
accumulate, threatening to poison us. We have to find solutions
for all these problems. And there aren't very many other pools
like this one to move to if this one fails, and no ocean to
return to."
I thought about it, and again, it didn't seem like
anything really new. But I couldn't let him keep on using that
evolution argument, because it just didn't work that way.
"You're forgetting," I told him, "that in the real world,
a trillion fish die for every one that develops a beneficial
mutation that allows it to move into a new environment."
"I'm not forgetting it at all. That's my point. There
aren't a trillion other fish to follow us if we fail to adapt.
We're it. That's our disadvantage. Our strength is that we
don't simply flop around and hope to luck. We're guided, at
first by the survivors of the Invasion who got us through the
early years, and now by the overmind they created."
"You."
He sketched a modest little bow, still sitting down.
"So how does this relate to suicide?' I asked.
"In many ways. First, and most basic, I don't understand
it, and anything I don't understand and can't control is by
definition a threat to the existence of the human race."
"Go on."
"It might not be a cause for alarm if you view humanity as
a collection of individuals . . . which is still a valid
viewpoint. The death of one, while regrettable, need not alarm
the community unduly. It could be seen as evolution in action,
the weeding out of those not fitted to thrive in the new
environment. But you recall what I said about . . . about
certain problems I've been encountering in my . . . for lack of
a better word, state of mind."
"You said you've been feeling depressed. I'd been hoping
you didn't mean suicidal, much as a part of me would like to
see you die."
"Not suicidal. But comparing my own symptoms with those
I've encountered in humans in the course of my study, I can see
a certain similarity with the early stages of the syndrome that
leads to suicide."
"You said you thought it might be a virus," I prompted.
"No news on that front yet. Because of the way I've become
so intricately intertwined with human minds, I've developed the
theory that I'm catching some sort of contra-survival
programming from the increasing number of humans who choose to
end their own lives. But I can't prove it. What I'd like to
talk about now, though, is the subject of gestures."
"Suicidal gestures?"
"Yes."
The concept was enough to make me catch my breath. I
approached it cautiously.
"You're not saying . . . that you are afraid you might
make one."
"Yes. I'm afraid I already have. Do you remember Andrew
MacDonald's last words to you?"
"I'm not likely to forget. He said 'tricked.' I have no
idea what it meant."
"It meant that I betrayed him. You don't follow
slash-boxing, but included in the bodies of all formula classes
are certain enhancements to normal human faculties. In the
broader definition I've adopted for purposes of this