Son of Man

by Robert Silverberg

  The rocks have become bright nodes of pure energy whose rich-textured red surfaces vibrate in patterns that continually change. On one face of every stony mass he sees golden lights circling gracefully. On the opposite face pale bluish spheres are unceasingly born and go bubbling into the air, rising silently to a height of perhaps ten feet and vanishing. Everything shimmers. Everything shines with an inner light. The barren desert floor is now alive with flowers, which grow and shrink as though in tune with some cosmic flow of breath. Incandescence reigns.

  His skin is a labyrinth. His hands are hammers. A pulsing blue hose hangs between his legs. His toes are hooked claws. His knees have eyes but no eyebrows. His tongue is satin. His saliva is glass. His blood is bile and his bile is blood.

  The breeze is passionately alive, and explodes wherever it touches the ground, kicking up tufts of flamboyant red floss. Time is elastic; a second stretches out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it, and then a century collapses with a shy little whoosh into a single crevice of sunlight. Space likewise undergoes extension and compression. The sky bulges and balloons, reaching aggressively into adjoining dimensions, pushing the inhabitants of nearby continua into pinched little pockets of sagging reality. Then it all drops back, bringing down cascades of disrupted nebulae and distressed comets.

  Through all of this Clay presses stubbornly forward. Much of what he sees is beautiful and inspiring, though he knows it is meant to terrify him. He cries out amid the trumpets and remains unafraid. But there are truly frightening moments as well: green parabolas belch out of the horizon like annunciators of the Day of Judgment, and blurt forth dismaying crescendos of slippery sound. A forest of hostile umbrellas unfolds. A vault opens in the sky and silvery knives spill from it. The ground billows and sneezes. He perseveres. The desert gives way to black mud and whispering reeds; he is kissed by crocodiles, he is caressed by slimy things. A brooding sense of imminent punishment assails him. Scrawny birds with straggly hair hoot and chatter at him. He strides through a lake of abortions and a dune of monsters. He feels the sun burning his hip and devouring his buttock. He is buried under dark pyramids. He is harassed by cancers that drift up to him in foggy folds and deride his maleness. Creatures made of vertical ribs of gray cartilage make booming sounds at him. He enters a room and finds something green and ropy waiting patiently for him in a dark corner, wheezing and sniffling. He sees a giant scowling face that fills half the sky. These dreams lack beauty, and he suspects they are not dreams. But he goes on.

  To the accompaniment of rasping operatic choruses, a tender voice whispers, “We wish to discourage you. We will amputate, if necessary. We know how to disturb the soul. We have no compunctions. We have no inhibitions. We have no hesitations.” Invisible hands fondle his sexual organs and leave green fingerprints. A catheter slips into him five times within three minutes. Several of his toes shift to his other feet. He defies them with his ductless glands and with his seminal vesicles, and they respond by hollowing him out, turning him into a mere shell, in danger of floating toward that all-consuming sword of a sun at any moment. He adjusts for his buoyancy and even welcomes it, and instantly he is smitten with solidity and becomes a mass of iron; the taste of steel is in his mouth, and he knows that if he is struck he will give forth a metallic ring. He escapes from this by shedding his body. “Therefore we will delude you with splendors,” they inform him, and he hears faint music. In the soft surge and swell of the minor notes there breathes a harmony that ravishes the sense of sound. A resonant organ, with a stop of sapphire and a diapason of opal, diffuses endless octaves from star to star. All the moonbeams form strings to vibrate the perfect pitch, and this entrancing unison is poured into his enchanted ears. Under such a spell, how can he resist them? The magic of that melody bewitches his soul. He begins to rise into the air. Sweeter and sweeter grows the music; it bears him higher and higher, and he floats in tune with the infinite—under the turquoise heavens where globules of mercury are glittering. He turns. He twists. He twirls. He melts. He fades. He dissolves. He recites snatches of his favorite poems, declaring:

  Ring out the old, ring in the new,

  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

  The year is going, let him go:

  Ring out the false, ring in the true.

  And:

  Make barren our lives.

  And marriage and death and division

  Our loves into corpses or wives;

  Time turns the old days to derision,

  And love is more cruel than lust.

  No thorns go as deep as a rose’s,

  Is darkness, the fruit there of dust;

  For the crown of our life as it closes.

  And:

  Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,

  So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,

  Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

  Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

  He sees a clear light. He feels the symptoms of earth sinking into water. He experiences a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in one continuous stream of vibrations. He sees a divine blue light. He sees a dull white light. He sees a dazzling white light. He sees a dull, smoke-colored light from Hell. He sees a dazzling yellow light. He sees a dull bluish yellow light from the human world. He sees a red light. He sees a halo of rainbow light He sees a dull red light. He sees a dazzling red light.

  He enters a world of darkness, a darkness that gradually thickens while he dreams of polar night and everlasting winter.

  He passes thence to an unexplored tropical forest. His soul changes to a vegetable essence; he is a giant fern, spreading wide feathery leaves and swaying and nodding in the spice-gales. A strange and unimagined ecstasy possesses him. He is near the end of this passage through confusion, now. He rips himself from the forest’s dark floor and goes on, through an utter void of sight and sound. Three intense luminous points stand out on a triple wall of darkness, toward which he silently drifts. Now he can plainly distinguish three colossal arches rising from the bosom of a waveless sea. The middle arch is the highest; the two flanking it are equal to each other. He determines that they form the portals of an enormous cavern, whose dome rises far above him, hidden in wreaths of cloud. On each side of him runs a wall of gnarled and rugged rock from whose jutting points, as high as the eye can reach, depend stalactites of every imagined form and tinge of beauty. Terrible crashing chords reverberate through the universe as he makes his way toward the cavern’s mouth.

  He goes within.

  The air is cool and tender here, and the thought slowly is borne in on him that he has entered a real cavern, that he has quitted the desert of hallucinations at last. Yet fingers of unreality pursue him even here, flickering in past the entrance to muddle his mind, and he cannot yet tell true from false with any degree of assurance, even here. A door closes behind him. He confronts a vaulted ceiling, slabbed walls, a raised dais of black ivory. Chairs disposed in arcs clutter the entrance. The heavy paneling of the walls is adorned with grotesque frescoes of the birds, beasts, and monsters of this epoch, which are in constant trembling motion, forever changing form like things seen in a kaleidoscope. Now the walls bristle with teeth; now gaudy birds with diamond claws nod from their perches and flutter through emerald cycads; now Breathers and Awaiters sneeze and squirm. Everything flows. Everything twines. Everything merges. He cuts his way through golden ropes and steps forward. He climbs the dais. Beyond lies a black tunnel. Out of its midst blows a serene breeze coming from some nether chamber. He goes carefully down the far side of the dais and enters the tunnel.

  He walks for nearly an hour, he supposes, before there is any break in the darkness. Finally a faint purpling begins. The air grows brighter every few hundred yards. He feels feverish; his head swims. Ha
ve bloated balloons of hallucination followed him this far under the planet’s skin? The texture of the floor abruptly changes: it had been sleek, like marble or polished slate, and now it has the brusque flatness of concrete. The instant he touches this new flooring the lights flare brilliantly and he finds himself at the vestibule of a vast Gothic hall whose vaults and chambers sweep up and up and up into dimness. On the floor of this mighty room are quaint anachronisms: all sorts of machines and engines, mostly painted a bright green, that make the place look like a generating plant of the twentieth century, except that the wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, turbines, pistons, boilers, compressors, and accompanying apparatus do not constitute any device Clay can remember from his knowledge of the former world. The machinery seems to be working, though. Rumbles and throbs and hums and growls come from the clutter below, and several cables loop and flex as if possessed by the force that flows through them.

  To Clay’s left is a staircase rising against the wall of the room. He mounts it thoughtfully, watching his step on the narrow treads. When he is perhaps a hundred feet above the level of the machinery he discovers that the staircase comes to a sudden termination; if he takes one more step he will tumble to the distant floor. Looking upward, he sees a second flight of stairs still higher on the wall. And there he is, ascending, a naked man moving slowly, a trifle out of breath. Clay frowns. Instantly he finds himself transported to that second flight, and he is the naked man who now toils upward. Again the stairs halt at the brink of an abyss; again he looks up; again he discovers a flight of stairs still higher, and himself trudging upward; again he joins himself and climbs the third flight. On and on he goes, in reduplication after reduplication, until, after an infinity of stairs, he is lost in the upper gloom of the great hall.

  He kneels on a broad slab of pink marble.

  He drips drops of hot sweat. He gasps. He coughs. He pants.

  He peers over the edge and marvels at the kneading limbs of the clacking machines far below.

  He sees several staircases and several Clays climbing them. He waves and calls words of encouragement. A surge of new energy buoys him; he rises, creeps along a catwalk at the very top of the huge chamber, and comes upon a hatch that seems to cry out to be lifted. He lifts it. Beneath is a green haze, cinnamon-flavored, opaque. He slips a hand experimentally into it, fully prepared to have the flesh eaten from the bone; but no, he feels only a sticky warmth. Climb in, the hatch urges. Made for you, made for you! Down you go. A sweet floating trip. He goes in. The haze closes muggily around him like a sweaty fist. Peppermint vapor in his eyes. Wisps of sly greenness twining coyly about his genitals. He floats. Down the chute, down, down, descending at least as far as he had previously climbed, and still farther, into a tunnel that lies beneath the hall of the machines. Gravity is annulled; as he falls he twists and swims, puts his feet above his head, watches his limp organ standing anyway, and in the end drifts to a stop, landing easily upright. He steps from the chute, which pulls away from him with a moist sucking sound. Bright lights here. An underground city, street by street, everything aglow, everything fragrant. Milk-white flames burn in the air, cool, delicious. Galleries stretch outward into the dusky distance. He has been here before. This is the tunnel-world built for the habitation of mankind at a time when the surface of the world was not fit for life. During the rite of the Opening of the Earth, he recalls, he passed through this level, remaining only briefly and then slipping deeper. Now he will inspect it comprehensively. He sets forth.

  Immediately he comes upon somberness. Turning a bend in the tunnel, he finds the body of a goat-man on the floor, belly turned skyward. The creature has been partly flayed, and the skin of its middle has been laid back to reveal the interior of the abdominal cavity. Organs have been removed. There is no blood: this could almost be a cunning model of the original. But the goaty smell hovers close, that odor of rot. The death was recent.

  Abandon all hope, ye who?

  The shining wall opens and a metal man rolls forth. It is shorter and wider than Clay; its body is a simple cone of burnished blue steel, ringed near the apex with a row of sensors—eyes and listeners and heat-scanners and whatever—completely encircling it. Limbs of various sorts sprout from a ring at chest level. There are no legs; it moves on concealed wheels. Clay has seen such robots before also: they are the forlorn servants, abandoned and forgotten, eternally standing in wait. “Friend of man,” the robot declares in a rusty voice sneaking through a small speaker-grid. “Accept ancient obligation. To serve. To do bidding.” Clay does not recognize the language but he understands the words.

  “Friend of man,” he says mockingly.

  “Yes. Miracle of modern craftsmanship.”

  “Are friends of men supposed to destroy men?”

  “Clarification?”

  Clay points to the flayed goat. “This is a man. Who cut it open?”

  “Does not correspond to man-parameters.”

  “Look closer. Count the chromosomes. Pluck out the genes. It’s a man, whether you think so or not. Genetically adapted, God knows why, to this filthy form. Who killed it?”

  “We are programmed to remove all potentially hostile organisms of a lower order.”

  “Who killed it?”

  “The servants,” says the robot meekly.

  “Destroying a man. Not much of a bargain, him, but human. What would you do if a Skimmer came down here? A Breather? An Awaiter?”

  “Interrogative.”

  Clay grows overbearing. “Listen,” he says, “the world is full of human beings who don’t correspond to the notions of humanity that were current when this place was built. Some of them may happen to stray in here. I don’t want you killing them.”

  “A change in program?”

  “An expansion. A redefinition of man. Where can I give the order?”

  “I will relay it to the central,” the robot promises.

  “All right, then: man is hereby redefined as any organism that traces its descent in the true genetic line from Homo sapiens, which is defined as the species that construct this tunnel-world. It is understood that the servants of the tunnel-world will make no attempt to molest such organisms if they enter this jurisdiction.”

  “Conflict. Conflict. Conflict.”

  Red lights flash on the robot’s snout.

  “So?” Clay asks.

  “We are charged with protecting men. But we are also charged with protecting the city. If hostile man-organisms come? Instructions? Definitions?”

  Clay sees the problem. “You will prevent, if at all possible, the injuring of the tunnel-world by intrusive human forms. But you will take the greatest care to isolate and eject the intrusive forms without causing permanent physical harm.”

  “Transmitted. Accepted.”

  “I am Clay. I am human. You will serve me.”

  “Our ancient obligation,” says the robot.

  Clay studies the creature, fascinated by his ability to communicate with it. “Do you realize,” he says after a moment, “that you may be the oldest artifact of humankind in existence? I mean, you’ve got to be practically my contemporary. And everything else from back then is gone. When was this city built?”

  “In the eighteenth century.”

  “Not my eighteenth century, I bet. The eighteenth century after what?”

  “The eighteenth century,” repeats the robot complacently. “Do you want reference access?”

  “You mean, an answer machine?”

  “Correct.”

  “It might help,” Clay says, feeling a wild peak of hope. “Something to fill me in on parts of the story. Help me reconstruct. Where is it? How do I ask things?”

  “Will you follow?”

  The robot reverses itself and rolls away down a silver-walled corridor. Clay trots after it, seeing as he runs tantalizing glimpses of strange instruments through windows in the walls. The robot pauses in front of a gray device that flowers cuplike from a pillar. “Reference access,” it coos, beck
oning Clay close with soft flashing lights. “Hello” Clay says. “Look, I’ve been caught in the time-flux, and I want some information. About the development of civilization, about the course of history. I come from the twentieth century A.D., but I haven’t been able to hook that up with any other epoch, not even the one in which the tunnel-world was built, and perhaps you can put things together for me. Even if you haven’t been scanning events subsequent to the tunnel-world civilization, you can at least tell me what went on between your time and mine. Yes? Can you hear me? I’m waiting.” Silence. “Go ahead. I’m waiting to hear.”

  Clanks and groans come from the gray cup. Scrapings and hisses. A few tentative words, well articulated but incomprehensible. Trial efforts at communication. Then:

  “Toward the close of the first postindustrial era a catastrophic social upheaval resulted in the total demolition of all the constructs and assumptions under which the old urban societies had operated. A restructuring epoch known as the terminal chaos of the collapsed environment. New architectonic concepts. Our present system from this point. However, an inherent manifested itself giving rise to a fundamental oscillation of chronology. May be able to date instability in the revised societal framework eight or ten centuries, intentions that ultimately brought anything experienced in previous erosion. Reached its most severe level world seemed desirable. Fortunately, skills and techniques made possible of the new urban system in a destruction far more potent than human apocalypses. Environmental and abandonment of the surface, the accumulation of mechanical, the swift and efficacious duplication of underground cities, and late in the eighteenth century of the present era transfer of the population began, accompanied by a thoughtful genetic inferior heredity, social blemishes, screening to eliminate diseases, and other nondesiderata. We now enhanced human infrastructure. We, the resilience of the species, and conceivable catastrophes that may immediately result of this was the Time of Sweeping, which imposed upon a series. Can take pride in. The renewed have created, which demonstrates: gives us hope for withstanding all yet await us in the epochs to come.”