Inside Outside

by Philip José Farmer

  “Here is one,” said the X, “who will answer your questions. He has been released now from the bonds of silence — as far as you two are concerned. He recognizes you as one of him.”

  “What do you mean?” said Cull hoarsely.

  The X did not reply but rose from the floor and soared toward the demon. The winged creature flapped away from the approaching figure and allowed it to fly through the entrance. Then, it came toward them, extending its wings out slowly, turning them to act as scoops, and pushing the air behind it. Coming near them, it maneuvered its wings in reverse and halted only a few feet away. Cull, despite his dismay at the X’s departure, admired the thing’s superb control. It was very difficult to fly under no-gravity conditions.

  The demon grinned, showing broad thick teeth, and said, “Welcome, brother! And sister!”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Cull. “Brother?”

  The thing did not answer. Instead, it gazed around and then, finally, said, “Noticed how hot it’s suddenly become? The generators are melting. The Immortals are destroying their equipment. We’d better get out of here before we cook. I like it hot, but not this hot.”

  Cull knew that, for the first time in his experience, a demon had spoken the truth. The room was getting hot, and it was evident that the cabinets were the source of the rise in temperature.

  “They’re melting,” said the demon. He flew over to Cull, managing to turn while doing so and presenting his backside to the man. “Here, you two grab hold of my tail. I’ll pull you out of here, and one of you pick up your unconscious friend on the way out.”

  A few minutes later, the train of four, the demon acting as engine, sailed out of the doorway and up a tunnel. Then, they were out in the void again, and the complex was whirling away from them.

  “We’ll be without a roof over our head for a long time,” he said cheerfully to them. “Then, when the Immortals have rearranged all the debris into many large masses of materials, rotating in defined paths, we’ll settle down on one. And we’ll start our damned and doomed work.”

  “We?” said Cull. “Would you mind explaining… brother?”

  “How much do you know?” said the thing.

  Cull told him what he had heard from the X’s. The demon laughed, and he said, “So, now you know why we couldn’t tell you the truth. Any more than you’ll be able to tell the newcomers the truth.”

  “Newcomers?”

  “Oh, yes. Those who will begin to repopulate this sphere. They’re a species who evolved inside just such a sphere as this. Only, the sphere was natural, not artificial. And it rotated just enough to generate a centrifugal force equivalent to about one-fiftieth of what your Earth had.

  “So, their forms are very different from ours. They don’t have wings; they propel themselves by taking in air through an orifice and expelling it forcibly through a cartilaginous tube. They travel backward, and, not needing limbs stiffened with bone, to act as levers against gravity, they have tentacles. But you will meet them in due time, and you will be as monstrous to them as we so-called demons were to you.”

  Phyllis said, “That… that X didn’t answer my question. I asked him why our world was changed so suddenly, why so many of us were killed and the rest left to die?”

  “Because the same thing will have happened, rather, is going to happen, to your Earth as it did to our planet. Through some agency which I don’t know, perhaps an atomic or biological warfare, perhaps an explosion of the sun, perhaps… I don’t know. My own people were exterminated when they sterilized themselves through the overuse of chemicals meant to destroy all harmful insects. By the time they realized what they were doing, it was too late.

  “As a matter of fact, the Immortals themselves must not have realized what was happening. Otherwise, I and many of my fellows would not have been left over.”

  He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “The Immortals have great wisdom. But they’re not infallible. We are evidence of that. They miscalculated the numbers that were to be born, and we were the unlucky ones in the surplus.”

  “I don’t understand you at all,” said Cull. “Left over? To be born? Surplus?”

  The demon laughed uproariously, so much so that he was not able to move his wings efficiently, and the train bobbed up and down.

  Cull gritted his teeth and wished he could kill the thing. But he was helpless.

  “You will pardon me,” said the demon. “I should not laugh. I can still remember, after all this time, how I felt when I first heard the truth. It was too much to bear — though I did bear it — that I should be a victim of statistics. One of the unavoidable surplus.

  “I’ll tell you, brother, something that will completely shatter you. And make you what it made me, that is a truly demonic creature.

  “You thought, after the Immortal spoke to you, that you had lived on Earth and died. And that this was the afterlife prepared for you by the Immortals, a strange sort of Heaven or Hell, to say the least.

  “You were wrong! You haven’t been born yet!”

  Phyllis gave a cry, but it was not the words of the demon that caused it. She said, “Fyodor just died, Jack! He opened his eyes, looked at me, sighed, and asked where he was. Before I could answer, he died!”

  Cull did not look back. He said, “Let him go, Phyllis. He’s one of the lucky.”

  “How right you are, brother,” said the demon. “Just as you will be if you are killed or find the courage to kill yourself. Then, you’ll be sent forth as a soul. But you won’t fulfill your natural destiny. Your kind are dead; you’ll have to attach yourself to some alien species. And it will be your fate never to feel at home, always to be a stranger.”

  “What in Hell are you talking about?” screamed Cull.

  “Calm down. Listen. The Immortals couldn’t let well enough alone. Having invented the artificial soul to ensure that all sentients should also be immortal, they then conceived of pre-birth conditioning. Why not, they said to themselves, build a prenatal world? Give the soul a body such as the soul is likely to have when it attaches itself to the as-yet-unborn body on the natural planet? Give its brain some synthetic memories, so that it thinks it has existed before? And then attempt to install an ethics before it is born?

  “The idea was that the creature would have a difficult enough time on Earth; it would find it hard to act ethically, as the Immortals conceive ethics and as much of mankind conceives it. Same on my planet. It would be a sort of before-Terrestrial-existence reflex conditioning.

  “The creature would go through a span of life in this sphere. And, there, through the lectures of the various X’s, it would be given a guidance pattern for its next life. This ethical foundation, would, of course, be subconscious. The soul, sent forth again to attach itself to an Earthly body, would have no conscious memories of the pre-Terran life. But there would be an unconscious urging to act ethically.

  “To put it in the words of your own Western ethics, mankind is doomed to fall from grace. But, thanks to the seeds implanted in the earlier life, he might rise again, be reborn the ethical man.

  “Don’t ask me what happens after a man has been born on Earth and then dies. The Immortals have planned another world for him, but it’s one I won’t know in this world. Nor the next.”

  Cull tried desperately to think straight. He said, “But what’s to keep me from being attached to a non-Western body? To a Confucianist Chinese? To an idol-worshipping African? Or, even, why should I end up on Earth? If it’s pure chance that determines what body I land in, why can’t I be ‘hooked’ onto some thing that lives on a planet a million lightyears away from Earth?”

  “Because, first, your soul will be — would have been — released in the vicinity of Earth, beamed toward it. Maybe you would have been a Hindu. So what? You’d still have the subconscious urgings to act ethically, to be good. In short, to follow the golden rule. The name of your particular god and the taboos and prejudices you’d have would have been determined by the race and
culture in which you were raised.”

  Cull looked back at Phyllis. She was staring at him as if she’d gone into shock. Her skin was bluish-white; her eyes, glazed. Beyond her, a small figure now, floated Fyodor.

  Cull thought, if Fyodor had been conscious and had heard all this, he would have denied the reason for this world. He would have said that the Immortals were atheists and blasphemers, that they lacked faith in God. Therefore, they were trying to do His work by creating these souls. Besides being atheists, they were being redundant, for the Creator had already fashioned souls. And to create a multitude of saviors to make sure that at least one got to Earth was even more shocking.

  Fyodor would have rejected everything the Immortals stood for and did. To him, they would have been the true demons, the Old Enemy, the Fathers of Lies.

  “If,” Cull said, “we’re really in some sort of pre-Terrestrial existence, how do the Immortals know what memories to give us? How do they know what form life will take on Earth?”

  “Oh, they keep several decades ahead of Earth’s expanding population. They supply souls faster than man can breed. And they know, of course, all about the cultures and languages and… everything. Now, you and the woman, for instance, were probably scheduled to spend about fifty Earth years inside this sphere. If you were killed here before the time was up, you’d have been resurrected as many times as was needed. Then, conditioning presumably having taken effect, you’d have been recorded and released as quanta or whatever you want to call them.

  “But, even the unforeseen can happen to the Immortals. Mankind on Earth came to a sudden end, just as my people did.

  “So, I was left here as surplus, as a sort of God’s gadfly, and the pre-birth Earthlings found me here and called me demon. Just as the new species to come here will rank you as demons.

  “You see, the subconscious memory the soul-quantum takes to Earth brings with it more than an ethical urging. It also brings with it memories of demons, giants, weird anthropomorphic beasts. Hence, mythology and the various archetypes and devils of various religions.”

  Cull burst out, “If this is true, and I’m still not sure you’re not tormenting me, why don’t you kill yourself? Release yourself from this hell?”

  “Because my body is a physical body. Its cells want to survive. I can’t bring myself to commit suicide. Not yet, anyway, not until the pressures get too great. Maybe you’ll be able to kill yourself. But I doubt it. You’ve survived all this; you’re too tough. You want to live.

  “Even all I’ve told you and all you’ve seen won’t quite convince you that there is another life. Just as I’m almost, but not quite, convinced. I want to live in the world I know. So, brother, we go merrily through hell together. Defeating the purpose of the Immortals by getting meaner and more vicious and cynical and sadistic. By the time we’re killed, we’ll be so set in our ways, that a thousand cycles of births and rebirths wouldn’t straighten us out.”

  “Then,” said Cull, “maybe the Immortals haven’t told you the truth either. Maybe you’re lying, and…”

  “Go to hell, brother,” said the thing, and it kicked violently against Cull’s grip on its tail and broke free.

  Away it winged while Cull and Phyllis hung in the dimly lit void.

  They clung together while the wreckage of a world drifted by. She wept softly for a while. Cull held her tightly and patted her shoulder or stroked her head. But he was not thinking of her. He was thinking that they would be blown by the winds. But which way, in what general direction?

  Between the interior of this sphere and space was a thin wall. The cold of space was seeping through, and the air layer next to the wall would be precipitating its moisture. Ice would form on the wall. The air next to it would cool and condense, thus forming a high-pressure area. The hotter air near the center of the sphere would make a low-pressure area. So, winds would be generated by the cold high-pressure air moving toward the center into the warm low-pressure region.

  This meant that he and Phyllis would not be blown against the ice-packed fog-surrounded walls. On the contrary, they’d be blown inward, toward the sun. But what kind of turbulence would be created inside this perfect sphere with winds moving inward with equal force from every square centimeter of sphere surface? If what the Immortal said was true, then the sphere would be given a slight spin. Air would have weight; so, also, the objects now floating. He and Phyllis would have a tendency to drift toward the wall. However, the inward-blowing winds would be more than strong enough to drive them away.

  So, a great whirlpool of air would be formed near the center. Would not he and Phyllis be caught in this and carried around and around and around?

  He did not know. He could not remember enough of meteorology to predict accurately.

  If they died from starvation or collision with debris, their souls, or quanta, would be released and then detected by the Immortals’ receivers. The Immortals would do whatever they did with recaptured souls and would later release them. They would go flying through the cosmos, ricocheting off the corners of the universe, go wherever chance took them. He and Phyllis would be separated, forever. He would be captured by a physical being whose form and neural structure attracted his soul. She, also, but perhaps at another area of the world, millions of lightyears away.

  He would be born again, this time in a nonhuman body, though it would have to have some resemblances to a human shape to ‘catch’ his soul-quantum. And his original destiny would have been thwarted. Never for him the planet of Earth. The memories he carried, even if he could recall them in his future being, would be false. But, he would not remember. That was the beauty of it. He would not remember. Even if, through some chance, he and Phyllis were reborn on the same planet, perhaps, even in the same womb as twins, neither would know the other.

  But would they dream strange dreams, glimpse terrifying yet half-familiar vistas thrust up by the unconscious during their sleep? Would they, if they did meet, feel an unexplainable affinity? And would anything they had learned about good and evil in this world influence them in the next?

  He did not know.

  There was more than one question he had not had time to ask. For instance, why had X worn dark glasses? Also, what was the origin and purpose of those stone idols Cull had found in the tunnel?

  Perhaps, the rumor about the dark glasses had come closer to the truth than one might expect. This said that X wore them to hide or shield the too-powerful glare of divinity shining from his eyes. This, of course, was false, but X could have used the glasses to create an even stronger nimbus of awe about him. Men looking at him would imagine the fearful burning-bright eyes behind the black spectacles.

  As for the idols, a tale was told about them, too. It said that, long ago, when the “demons” had been the majority, they had imposed demon-worship on the human beings. Idols were used by the demons in “churches.” When man became numerous enough to overthrow the demons, he had demolished the idols.

  Perhaps, the demons had managed to hide some of these and had been planning to bring them out when another cataclysm would so thin out and disorganize mankind that the demons could reinstate their rule and religion.

  Unfortunately for the demons, they had been almost all killed, too.

  He opened his mouth to speak about his thoughts to Phyllis, and then he found that he could not. The words would not come. The silence imposed by the Immortals extended even to a fellow-“demon?”

  She looked at him through tears and said, “What were you going to say, Jack?”

  “I love you,” he said, and he kissed her.

  Later, while he gazed over her shoulder, he thought how easily those words had come. It was true that he had spoken partly to allay her fears and to make her feel protected and a little more secure. Yet, did not this desire to do so mean that he loved her? Not a love based only on sexual attraction, though that was part of it, but a love based on her being human.

  “Here comes another lost soul,” he said.

>   Phyllis twisted around in his embrace so that she could see also.

  In so doing, she imparted even more spin to their already rotating state. As they turned head over heels and around and around, they saw the newcomer get larger and larger until, presently, they perceived every detail of its body.

  It had a long tubular body, brown and yellow, with six slim tentacles at one end, six fins projecting at various angles from various places, and a fringe of serrated skin at the other. On the end nearest the two people were two thick fleshy stalks, one on each side of the body. Each of these stalks bore two eyes in deep sockets, and Cull got the impression that they could focus as well as his own eyes. There was an opening in the end pointed at them; it had two thick crimson-colored lips that parted and closed. These, Cull surmised, were the valves for the air-compression tube that the creature would use in its jet-propulsion through the atmosphere.

  Presently, the thing was circling them cautiously. Then, apparently having decided they could do it no harm, it shot up to them and gently flicked Phyllis with one of the three slim tips of a tentacle.

  Phyllis screamed.

  The thing screamed also, and it sped away.

  “It’ll come back,” said Cull. “Sooner or later, we’ll be its slaves, just as the ‘demons’ were ours.”

  He tried to tell Phyllis what he was thinking but found again the obligation of silence was on him.

  Now I know how the demons felt, he thought. I want to warn these creatures that their actions here will influence their lives in another world. But I won’t be able to. And so I’ll get exasperated because they can’t see what I so plainly see. I’ll become angry with them because they’re so blind, so stupid. And so, wanting them to do the right thing, I’ll hate them because they’re being selfish, cruel, indifferent, arrogant, petty. I’ll hate them. But, at the same time, I’ll love them.