by James Gunn
“What are you doing here?” he asked at last, too strong now to be denied the information he needed, sure enough of his strength and of her attraction to him that he could risk bluntness. “Why did you bring me back?"
She took a deep breath and let it out as if the final truth came with it. “I heard of you. Stories circulate through the center about those who have chosen total immersion. At first"—she looked away as if it hurt to remember a time of casual interest—"it was only curiosity. One should not be merely curious about another human being's predicament.” He could hardly hear her voice. “But then I learned more about you from Central Information."
“About me?” he echoed. The possibility that he had a real past was both exciting and alarming.
“You are a famous person,” she began.
“No, don't tell me,” he interrupted. “I don't want to know. Not yet. Perhaps not ever."
She nodded. She was willing to do anything he asked, and he liked that.
“So I found you."
“How?"
“You had placed no privacy block on the information, nor on your door."
From one of his lives he remembered privacy blocks. “Why wouldn't I do that?"
She shrugged; he liked the way her shoulders moved and almost forgot what she was saying. “Perhaps you were in too much of a hurry for what you wanted to do. Perhaps you didn't care. I like to think you wanted to be found, to be brought back. Anyway, we found you, the volunteer and I, and he told me what the console was programmed to do."
He looked at the console sitting in powerful isolation at the side of the room, looking majestic even in pink. “Yes,” he said.
“You remember?"
“I remember something,” he said, “but it may not be real."
“I felt sorry for you,” she said, “and guilty, you know, because it was only curiosity, and there you were, floating in the tub, all your skills and promise as a person subverted by someone else's memories, lost in a thousand other lives, caught in a cyclical vengeance for some blow that you had forgotten completely."
He thought of himself floating there like a dreaming gnome, like some wrinkled grub. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “I have forgotten. I have forgotten."
“Even then I could see what you could be, and I knew what you had been."
Again the words asking about his past shaped themselves in his mind, and his tongue and lips practiced how they would sound, but he held back. “I am a man without a past,” he said, “and without a future. Or rather I have a thousand pasts, and none of them is real—not one."
“You have a past,” she said. “A real one."
“It must have been terrible,” he said, “to have driven me to program the console as I did, to kill, over and over, the woman I loved. Whatever it was that drove me to do that, I don't want to know; I don't want to feel that way again. Let me start fresh—a man with many memories and none of them more real than the others. Only then can I have a future."
She looked away shyly. He found it oddly moving in a woman who in his need had held him to her naked breast. Now he was no longer an invalid; no longer was he incapable of the male response. “You have a future,” she said, “if you want it."
No past but a future. It was, indeed, like being born again. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, for what she had done and most of all for what she was, beautiful inside and out, but he remembered that he had once trusted a woman (or trusted her many times over) and that she had hurt him as many times as he had trusted her. The words died in his throat, but he knew they were there, and he knew some day he would tell her if she stayed with him long enough, if she didn't discover the blackness inside him and leave in disgust.
That she stayed, that she cared, that she did not turn away was what he still found difficult to believe.
* * * *
He had much to relearn about his world, and Sara was a good teacher, full of information and eager to impart it. She talked to him for hours a day about life in what she called the twenty-second century. The four basic ingredients of their civilization, she said, were power, automation, computers, and capsules representing energy, work, control, and knowledge—a complete system, with humanity in the middle as the beneficiary.
Most of the world's work went on without human intervention. Solar energy, collected from vast arrays of solar cells built in the sunny deserts of the world and from the even larger arrays floating in the shadowless space around the earth, provided all the clean power that anyone could need anywhere in the world. Power was free. Machines, under the direction of great, interconnected computers, built and maintained the great urban centers (though few of the giant complexes had been built since the dramatic decline in the birthrate); they tended crops in fields and hydroponic gardens, and they delivered all the necessary supplies and services to each apartment in the centers. The computers were the overseers, controlling the efforts of the machines, responding to the requests of the humans, guiding, informing, servicing, storing. And the capsules contained not only information, so that people could learn what the world was like and what it had been like and what other men and women had thought about it and how to do things, but experiences—memories so complete that they could be lived and relived with only an injection from a capsule programmed from a computer.
It would be pleasant to think, Sara said, that this good life had been created deliberately, but that wasn't true; it had grown, like any other society, out of possibilities and pressures and small choices. The computers and free, plentiful energy had made a planned society possible for the first time in man's history. Relieved of his age-long concern for food and power, he could have built himself a utopia; instead he moved along paths of least resistance. The self-contained urban centers had made sense: total efficiency in the delivery of services, the use and reuse of resources, and total privacy if desired. But nobody planned it. The urban centers grew, and the men and women who lived in them like cave dwellers independent of the need to leave began to shape their lives to fit their dwellings. They enjoyed a carefree period of growing up in a crèche, socializing with other children of their age, tended by a few loving volunteers and a great many efficient machines, learning the few things necessary for their life in the urban centers, taught by capsules or computers: the resources available to them and how to order them. Other kinds of information were available, and occasionally an odd child would pursue an unexpected interest through a console for hours or days or even many days. But mostly the children were happy with games and self-discovery, with music and dance and art and lovemaking.
When the children became young adults, they graduated from the crèche into their own apartments, each with its own console. For a while their social training brought them back together for mutual stimulation; they played the games of adolescence, the games of interplay and romance, and the even more exciting games of trying on personalities like false faces. Most of them never discovered who they were, if they were anybody. And they roamed the urban center, capsule-popping, apartment-hopping, gay and scintillating and pleasure bent; apparently happy, never unhappy, or if they were unhappy, it was somebody else's unhappiness.
Gradually the urban center's privacy potential began to work upon them. As the group games began to pale, they paired off or retired singly to their apartments to pursue their solitary pleasures. A few—usually those strange children who went scurrying through the computers after useless information—became specialists in areas where the computers were not effective. They became artists, composers, authors, historians, philosophers, synthesizers, dreamers.... Out of the vast amount of source material available, out of the work of all the other specialists, the dreamers made the capsule life possible by imagining in sensory detail the new experiences that the poppets demanded. Some were noted for their incredible attention to detail; some for the consistency of their scenarios; some for their emotional content; and some for the wildness of their dreams, because novelty was always in demand. The computers wo
uld take blood samples and synthesize the capsules. Sometimes the dreamers would dream to order.
In the urban center humanity found everything it had ever sought from life and was given the opportunity to become whatever it had the potential to become. But it turned out that principally humanity had the potential to become a mature animal, which for most meant a creature isolated and content, its desires satisfied in being what it was. Nobody traveled anymore—not even as far as the neighboring urban center. Humanity, now freer than it had ever been, returned to the tribe and the cave. A few persons, it is true, still sought real-life experiences; they volunteered their services, when needed, and they came into contact with others, and out of these contacts grew something new, something unpredictable.
* * * *
Later, the slowly recovering invalid used the console to pursue information further into areas that interested him. The use of the console and the other equipment in the apartment brought back old skills, and memories—were they his own or had he gotten them secondhand?—flooded back to aid him in his reeducation. By now he had accepted, almost without reservation, that this experience was real, that he had been a citizen of this world and that he had forsaken it for reasons he did not want to remember. The information and abilities that a child takes years to learn, even with the aid of capsules, came back to him in weeks, without the aid of capsules, for he knew that they would bring back other memories with them; but he had the advantage of a mature nervous system, ravaged though it had been, and the memories of a lifetime, complicated though they were by a thousand other lifetimes of memories. The synapses were prepared, ready to be used.
When he had become comfortable enough in his new situation to ask questions and confident enough of his newly recovered physical strength to accept the answers, he said, “You're very knowledgeable for a poppet.” He savored the word, feeling it strange on his lips, but proud of it as a mark of belonging.
“I was never a poppet,” Sara said, “and neither were you. We were the odd ones, the unusual children, the nonconforming adults. Perhaps that is why ... things hit you so hard."
He put out a hand to stop her; perhaps he was not as strong as he thought. But he felt lean and tall and strong and young leaning against the pink console while she sat on the edge of the round bed. “The past is as dead as month-old gamma globulins,” he said. One of the interests he had pursued through the console was blood chemistry. “There is only the present—and the future. Why did you come here, Sara? What do you want from me?"
She looked helpless on the edge of the bed, and he almost took back his questions before she had to answer them. “I was—am a synthesist,” she said. “I don't create anything, but I put things together in new combinations. What became apparent to me, and a few others, was that humanity was dying, succumbing to a life that satisfied desires before they became needs, almost before any desires were expressed. We wanted to gather together a nucleus of people who had learned that this world had a dark side, who had lived some of its horrors and were willing to work for something new. I thought you might be one of these."
“Were you right?"
“You're the only one who can answer that,” she said. But she looked hopeful. “You have to be willing to let go of the old and try the new. You'll have to tell me when you're willing to try something brave and different."
He found himself standing in front of her, tears in his eyes, holding out his hands to her, taking hers, raising her to him. He kissed her closing eyes and felt her tremble as his lips moved down her soft cheek to her lips, and he knew, as they sank toward the pink bed, that he was ready for whatever life might bring or whatever courage might enable him to seek out.
“I love you,” he said, and it was as if he had never said those words before. And though he had felt ten thousand times before the emotions and physical sensations that surged through him now, it seemed as if everything that went before had happened to someone else, as if this were all happening to him for the first time, and he hoped desperately that this was real.
What was brave and different, he discovered, was venturing outside the apartment. He pulled himself away from this room, the color and the shape and the smell of love, and with Sara—he could not have done it without her constant encouragement, her urging, her rewarding—he went to other parts of the center. At first they went only down the drop shaft to the lobby below, where shafts circled the oval room, with its neutral yellow carpet, like fasces surrounding the ax handle of authority.
Connected by corridors with the lobby of their building were other lobbies, each with its oval of lift shafts and drop shafts. Together twenty-five of the lobbies and the oval buildings that ascended seventy-five stories above them made up an urban center. In the middle of the building complex were joint heating, cooling, and ventilation shafts, water and food distribution systems, and other service facilities, including automatic waste recycling. No windows faced the outside, even from the lobby, and the bronze door to the outside looked as if it had been welded shut by generations of disuse.
Much of this he did not know until later. The first time it was as much as he could do to visit the lobby, to step out of the drop shaft and smell the neutral, unconditioned air and feel the terrifying vastness of its open, unused space, before he fled back to the apartment. Gradually, encouraged by Sara's love, he expanded his range as his courage grew. They visited other lobbies, all empty, all identical in their dimensions and their painted cement walls—these were public spaces, and they could not be attuned to individuals nor adjusted to individual color sensitivities—and their painted murals celebrating the victory of humanity over the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
They visited the commons, which joined the oval towers of the urban center at the thirty-fifth floor; a few brave or eccentric men and women gathered there daily to share a meal at one of the scattered tables. The odors were tempting, the lighting was carefully gauged to enhance the attractiveness of the food, and the pastel colors of the walls reinforced a mood of social ceremony. But the small group in the huge room seemed gloomy and the gaiety forced; the food was the same as that available in every apartment, but here it turned to dust and leather. Gradually, however, with Sara's help, he came to accept the company of others, even eating with them and almost enjoying it.
“After all,” Sara reminded him, “you were once a volunteer yourself,” but he told her that was all dead and gone, and he did not want to hear about it.
Slowly he found himself becoming acculturated to his own culture. He had been drawn by degrees out of the security of the pink room; he was beginning to rejoin the larger society of his fellow citizens.
Toward the end they visited a crèche of six-year-olds. He enjoyed the openness of the youngsters, the free and uncomplicated games they played, and their willingness to share not only their momentary belongings but themselves. They were marvelous and beautiful, and he wondered, for the first time without instant withdrawal, about his past. Had he fathered a child? He remembered being a father....
...a boy and a girl, lying stretched out beside the black remains of an old fire as if they were asleep....
But perhaps that was only a dream. It was associated with loss and grief and betrayal, as was everything in the past. He pulled himself back to the present.
Twice in the lobby they passed a group of young revelers, magnificent in their strength and grace and beauty, enraptured in some communal dream, moving as if they were part of some carefully choreographed ballet, speaking as if their words had been composed by some artist in counterpoint. He was fascinated by them, but Sara passed them by scornfully. “They're nothing but butterflies,” she said.
“But beautiful."
“Beautiful and mindless and short-lived. Is this what it all comes to, the human race? All the struggle and the pain and the sorrow? Poppets dreaming somebody else's lies?"
He admired her fire, even though he himself had been a poppet dreaming more deeply than any of them and had been bro
ught back to reality—tell me it is reality!—only by her determination and patience and, he dared to think it, love. It was a word she never used. He used it more freely now, with fewer qualms, as if by its incantation he could drive away its potential for evil, seldom thinking anymore that he had once loved someone else so much that he had chosen to spend eternity revenging himself on her.
But Sara had said he had not been a poppet, that he had been a volunteer. That was good, he thought. It was good to be a volunteer.
One day they visited the top of their tower. The lift shaft had climbed interminably, and finally they emerged into a room filled with light. He stopped, just inside the room, dazzled. Slowly his vision returned, and he saw a room filled with tables and chairs waiting for people to be seated at them. The carpet was red and deep under their feet, and the walls around the entire perimeter of the room were set with shining panels. The room was empty except for them.
“No one has been here for ages,” Sara said.
She led him toward one of the shining panels. As he neared it, he realized that it was not a panel at all but a window, and the light was sunshine streaming through. He had never seen a window before, except perhaps in his other lives. He approached it with curiosity and then stopped, a half pace away, panic surging through his body as he looked out and out to the distant green semicircle of land against the blue sky. He felt himself toppling forward into nothingness, exploding into the infinite, and his hands reached out and found the air hard and slick and cold in front of him, and he could not breathe.