by John Maclay
He looked down at the dark case behind her. “There is hardly room for another there,” he said. A smile grew inside me, though I felt my face to be still stern and seemly. For there was rejection in his tone, unmistakable and inflexible.
She turned from the volcano to look at him again. “You will reject the chance of life? Of a vision of the future offered to no other in all of history, so far?”
“I have already rejected the chance of life,” he said mildly. “If I had been anxious to continue my existence, I would not have decided upon recording the death of my world. Even to the end. As for the future—it sounds to be a place where I would find no disciples worthy of my teaching. If discipline is, indeed, lost there, it cannot be brought back by one lone teacher resurrected from a past that is forgotten.”
“But we need you!” she said impetuously. “We have lost so much, even while gaining mastery of material things. Surely you will come!”
He stepped down from the platform to stand in our rank. “These men and women have given their lives into my hands. They have dedicated their very spirits to the task I set for them. Shall I leave them to die in my place and flee to some wonderful time, betraying my own teachings? No, Lady. I will not go.”
As if to emphasize his words, the volcano belched a gout of flame and smoke that turned the day into twilight. Two of the pillars that were set about the terrace rocked drunkenly, then fell away to break on the stone below.
“It is not useful to master material things,” Kyros cried above the rumbling of the Mountain, “unless you have first mastered the flesh you stand in and the spirit that lives inside it. Without that mastery, you are like children playing with chips and stones. Without focus and without restraint. Record my words, Lady, for your future.”
“Be certain of this: I have already recorded all that has happened since I appeared,” she said.
“Then say this also, to the ones who come after. A readiness to die for knowledge should be nothing to amaze those who seek after it. Unwillingness to betray Truth in order to empower oneself or to bolster up a theory should be more integral to the seeker than the very blood in his body. If, in that unguessable time, those who are teachers and philosophers have forgotten this—or never learned it—then our race has gone back, not forward, and I do not wish to look upon such a time or such people.”
It was very dark now, yet the shimmer of her blackness was quite visible against the pale stone and ash. She seemed to have drawn herself up, almost quivering with some emotion that we could not assess. She was beautiful, strange, frightening—as the Mother Goddess indeed.
I went to my knees at the edge of the platform. “Surely you are She!” I cried, above the rumbling and hissing of the Mountain. “Only the Earth Mother would come at this time to comfort our passing, to see to the working of her world! Tell us; oh, tell us!”
Ash was swirling in the air, half hiding her. Yet we could see the smile that dawned in her eyes. I felt a feather-touch inside my head, and she looked down at me.
“Lakit, my Son, you must be correct. Surely the Mother of your world would not leave such devotion unacknowledged. Be comforted. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten forever. Those who stand here will be heroes in another age, as well as in this. Time will praise you, Children of Thera!”
She reached down and down and took my tablet from my hands. “Your writing will go back with me to my own place. Those of the others must be cast into the bay quickly! Quickly, or you have wasted your lives. Run!”
My fellows sealed their cases of writings. Then they ran to the far edge of the terrace that rose above the bay and cast their burdens as far across the choppy waters as possible.
Hardly had they regained their positions near the Goddess when there came a roar to beggar all those that went before. We turned to see the top half of the Mountain rise into the air, parting slowly as it rose, moving outward above a hellish glow that must be all the lava of the deep, set free into the world of day.
Kyros knelt among us, as we looked up at the woman, the Goddess, whoever she might be. She stretched out her hands as if to ward away the debris that was almost upon us. Then she stepped back, back, into her casing.
“I wish that I might die with you. Death in battle is easy, amid the excitement of the moment. It requires only the discipline of hot blood and desperation. This is another thing, cold and disciplined and purposeful. It is a great thing. You will be remembered. Go with that in your hearts and minds. You will be remembered!”
A rush of over-hot air blew me flat on my face, but I pushed upward, feeling my robe smolder on my shoulders. Beside me Kyros stirred feebly and I put out my hand to comfort him. But I couldn’t breathe. My eyes seemed to be bursting from my head, my lungs heaving with effort. I knew that I was dying.
Yet even then I saw the cold flame move again—up the casing of the woman who had come. And a shimmer. A shimmer of blackness that was the last thing that I knew.
THE NEXT GENERATION
There are so many potential futures, and if we make bad choices they may well include some horrible ones. We seem to be very busy preparing those right now.
The infant never breathed.
Noura, tensed over her control board in the observation station, bent forward, her fingers ready over the keyboard.
The staff in the birth cubicle was superbly competent, their electronic nervous systems incredibly swift, their pseudo-flesh fingers agile. There was a Nan on duty, her padded shape warmed to comfort the child, if it should breathe on its own.
Yet Noura, in her role as observer and representative human being, knew that at times only flesh-and-blood intelligence could step in with necessary insights.
Golden hands, made of an amalgam of plastic and metal, drew the child from its mother’s body; the eyes opened in the blood-streaked face. For one instant they stared into the monitor, seeming to look directly into Noura’s. Then the umbilicus was snipped and tied, and at the instant of severing the eyes went dull. The tiny lungs never fluttered. No blip on the monitors offered any hope.
Noura pressed the SALVAGE key, her fingers going down too hard, too fast. One of the staff slid the gurney on which the sweating, exhausted mother lay into the tube leading to Post-Delivery, and the others closed in about the table on which the child had been placed.
Noura touched another key, sending the Skull-System down from its position in the oval top of the cubicle. Golden figures moved, placing the infant beneath the cupped protrusion, which opened like a flower to reveal petals of keen metal. It moved down onto the small head, closing the features, still streaked with birth fluids, from Noura’s view. She winced, knowing that the blades were slicing away the soft skull like the peel of a fruit, exposing the mass of the brain to those ready to link the life-support systems.
While the machine was cautiously severing the brain’s connections to the dead body of the infant, Noura’s fingers were racing, ordering up the components of the body for this newly salvaged child. By the time the leads and the tubes of nourishing fluids were in place, the tiny, shining body came sliding down the delivery tube into the hands of the attendants.
Her part was done now. It would be some time before the child would be secured in his new environment, and Noura found that she could not sit there, watching, waiting, until that was completed. No, she would go and observe the School. It would make her, perhaps, feel a bit more cheerful.
She rose, her old joints creaking and painful, and turned to the Slip, which carried those who lived in the Laboratory Complex wherever they wanted to go. All were almost as old as she, and they were grateful for that effortless manner of getting about.
She touched a button on a map of the interior of the Lab, and the strip began to move, smoothly, slowly, along the dim hallways. She could remember when all this had been sparkling new, shiny-clean with steel and paint.
She could recall when hum
an children were born with the ability to breathe on their own, to live with pleasure and pain in the bodies they should have, instead of plasmoid and metal shells. The woman now recovering from childbirth was the last one of fertile years in all the small remaining enclave of their kind, and she was forty-three.
The birth had been hard, and there would be no more pregnancies for Lisha. This was almost to be considered a wasted effort, except for the fact that there was one more human mind available to their dwindling complement.
Noura came to a corner and touched another point on the map, riding the Slip smoothly around and down another angled branch. She wondered, for the thousandth time, what error her species had made, here in its third millennium of technology, that had doomed its children. Was it the artificial manipulation of viruses? Was it the experimental use of radiation to spur growth and intelligence?
The Slip came to a halt beside a long rank of windows. Noura stepped off and moved to lean against the glass. No matter how alien the School might be, the sight of all those small bodies, playing, learning, creating, always made her feel less despairing.
The human brain being conditioned over the generations to exist at each step in its development in a body of a certain size, the robot bodies into which the salvaged brains went were made in various dimensions, from infant to adult.
The oldest Salvaged child was now twenty, and it was now a teacher of its younger kindred. Noura saw Estil bending over a youngster who was manipulating shapes and colors into intricate patterns, its gleaming metallic skull reflecting the clean pinkish light.
Estil would have been a woman now. Instead, she was a sexless creature cased in a body without sensation. There had been a great deal of hesitation before the Elders had agreed to put Salvaged brains into mechanical bodies. Some feared the resulting intelligent and emotionless personality. Some felt that it was better for their species to die out entirely, instead of creating what might become a race of monstrous semi-robots.
One of the smaller children glanced up and noticed her face at the window. The face, of course, was a smooth curve with only the eye-cells breaking its symmetry, so it could not smile, but one hand went up in a shy wave.
Noura felt a surge of pain rise in her chest. She remembered the warm, heavy feel of a baby in her arms, the milky smell, the mutual comfort of physical contact with her own flesh and blood. Even diapers and spit-ups had been worth it, she now knew.
The light in the Schoolroom turned blue. The dozen children, all sizes from toddler to teenager, stopped immediately, shutting off computers, closing down holo-generators, putting away tapes and viewers. Bodiless children had no feelings. They did not object to stopping their play or to going to bed, though once there they lay wakeful, needing no sleep.
What did they think, in those long reaches of the night while their parents slept? Noura was grateful, sometimes, that she didn’t know.
Now the line of parents, here to take away their young for the evening, was slipping smoothly into the hall beside her. She smiled at Lotta and Wim, who came to stand beside her at the window, watching their nine-year-old, identified by an orange dot on the upper front of the metal skull, pick its way out of the room.
One of the toddlers tripped and fell, and Orange-dot bent and set it gently onto its feet. Noura recalled with sudden intensity a time, eighty years in the past, when she had tripped in the schoolroom and a larger boy had taken great delight in stepping onto her outflung hand. There had been no gentleness there.
Had there ever been that sort of caring among her flesh-and-blood schoolmates? She tried to think, but her memories of childhood were a long, cold corridor of misery and competition.
She and her peers had been taught to excel, and those teaching them had lost sight, she now knew, of the thing that made the species work best. Cooperation, tenderness, mutual understanding, and effort had not been a part of the human condition for centuries before her birth.
She had often watched the Schoolroom here in the Labs. She had never seen one of the children assault or tease another or otherwise disrupt the even tenor of life there.
In their chilly, unfeeling bodies, did the human brains, nourished with uncontaminated and perfectly formulated nutrients, fed exactly the correct amount of oxygen, cleansed of waste with mechanical efficiency, still long for contact? For love?
Noura shivered. The parents, holding small metal hands in their own, were leading their young away, sliding effortlessly along the corridor amid a light hum of conversation. The small one who had waved, a Blue-dot, passed her, and she heard the speaker that was its voice say, “Goodbye, Ma’am Noura.”
“Goodbye,” she said, straining to recall the name. “Goodbye, Petro. Perhaps I shall see you tomorrow.” Then it was gone, and she knew that the time had come to return to her terrible task.
In the main corridor again, she found herself moving along beside Andre, who once had been her mate. He was bent—more than she, she noted with satisfaction—and his wrinkled hands were spotted with brown. He glanced aside and his narrow mouth thinned in a smile.
“The child—it is born?” he asked her, keeping his gaze away from her face. “It is...normal?”
“Normal for the present,” she said. “They are making the transfer now. It should be finished by the time I return. Lisha is alive, though her vital signs were alarming during the delivery. But she will recover, though never again will I ask her to undergo this. And she—she was the last woman capable of conceiving.”
Andre’s fingers clenched on his loose robe. He had paled, his face going gray. “No. There is no point in going on. Those back there in the Schoolroom will carry on, when their time comes.” She could see his pain in the set of his frail body.
“How?” The question came almost as a cry. “For what? And how could they ever carry on the species, without bodies, without even hormones and ova?” She caught his robe as he prepared to step off at his own workspace.
“Andre, tell me. Have we done a terrible thing to these children? They would be safely dead, out of the stress, the demands, the unmapped wilderness of the future that must lie before them. When Lisha and those of her age-group are gone, the little ones will be on their own.
“What sort of world can they shape, if they manage to survive? Have we sentenced them to a hopeless future that will end in intolerable loneliness and death?”
He pulled the cloth gently from her fingers and stepped free of the Slip. “Whatever their bodies may be like, the minds are human. They are not distracted by the matters that have made our kind self-centered and aggressive and brutish. Perhaps they may create a better world, however long they can make it last, than our sort ever did.” Then he was left behind, as Noura slid on toward her own place.
She left the Slip at her door and stood staring into space for a moment. A memory, sharp as a cameo, came.
She stood in an open field, the grass as high as her waist, staring about at this untamed world outside the Labs. No plow had broken its soil in many centuries. No hunter had invaded the forest beyond it; no fisherman had dropped his lures into the stream wandering through it for so long that those things might never have happened on this world at all.
Her father, holding her hand and leading her through this unimagined world outside their protecting walls, was speaking to her. “Soon we will close the portals permanently. Now that we can create our own sustenance, using the reactors, there is no necessity for us to come out into the wild, but I wanted you to see it before it is shut away forever.
“It is dangerous here now. Animals we had thought gone forever, a few generations ago, now hunt the wood, prowl in the fields, fly across that unpolluted sky. We no longer know how to deal with them, and there is no need for us to learn. But remember, Noura. Remember, and tell your children about this, for it is the world to which our kind was born.”
The vision fled; but she had, indeed, taught her
daughter about that invisible world beyond the barriers, the ventilators, the exhaust chutes. Was it possible that the young ones in the Schoolroom might one day unseal the portals, iris their round locks open, and walk out into the wonder of a planet healed of its wounds and free of the poisons her species had loosed there?
She turned, feeling a lifting in her heart. These children cared. She could see it in their interactions in the Schoolroom.
Perhaps they would revel in the freedom, after their long captivity. Surely they would not work the damage upon it that their ancestors had done.
She touched her door, and it slid into the frame. Even as she moved toward her keyboard and the waiting chair, there came a sound from the door connecting her post to the Birth Cubicle.
The Nan, her warm padding wasted on the chilly shape in her hands, stood there. “Ma’am Noura,” said her somewhat metallic voice, “Here is the child.”
Noura drew a deep breath. Then she turned and opened her arms, allowing the robot to set into them the body of her newborn grandchild.
INDULGENCES
The day may come when the most wonderful luxury possible will be the world we have right here in our hands but do not appreciate or protect.
She sat in a lotus position at the very edge of the free-flowing brook. The ripples purled about her hips and her angled knees; the rounded pebbles, green and pale blue and ochre, made the moving water sing in a muted series of tones.
Her eyes were closed, for the Seller of Indulgences was forbidden to look into the faces of those who came to buy. And Jonah, just off the shuttle, found himself awed at the calm clarity of her expression as he inched forward.