The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  Even in the poor light of the substation Mazda visibly turned green. “Goshawks!” she gasped. She staggered against the wall. Then she began taking off her clothes.

  Dress, slip, panties went on the floor. She stood on one foot and removed her sandals alternately. She began going through her hair and pulling out bobby pins. She took off her blast bracelet and added it to the heap.

  “What are you doing that for?” the Reverend inquired. It seemed to him a singularly ill-chosen time for sex.

  “I’m trying to set up a counter-charm, and I have to be naked to do it.” Her voice was wobbling badly. “Those birds—those birds are goshawks. I’ve never known the Company to send them out but once before. Those lumps on their backs are portable No us projectors. They’re trying to teleport us.”

  “Teleport us? Where to?”

  “To… to the Company’s cellars. Where… they attend to people who believe in public power. They… oh… I can’t talk about it, Clem.”

  She crouched down at his feet and picked up a bobby pin. “Don’t move,” she said without looking up. “Try not to think about anything.”

  She began to scratch a diagram around him on the floor with a pin. He coughed. “Don’t cough,” she cautioned him. “It might be better to hold your breath.”

  The Reverend’s lungs were aching before she got the diagram done. She eyed it a moment and then spat care fully at four points within the hexagram. A faint bluish glow sprang up along the line she had traced on the floor.

  Mazda rose to her feet. “It’ll hold them for a few minutes,” she said. “After that…”

  The Reverend raised his eyes to the rafters. “I’m going to pray,” he announced. He filled his lungs.

  “O Lord,” he boomed powerfully, “we beg thy blessing to preserve me and Mazda from the power of the ravens. We beg thy blessing to help us stay here and not be transported to the P&G’s cellars. Bless us, O Lord. Preserve us. And help us to make thine old-fashioned Christmas a living reality. Amen, O Lord. Amen!”

  Mazda, too, was praying. Hands clasped over her diaphragm, head bowed, lips moving silently, she besought her bright divinity. “Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, the counter charm on the floor is fading. Preserve us! Mithras… Mithras, Savior, Lord!”

  Prayer is a force. So is magic. So is the energy from Nous projectors. These varying forces met and collided in the air.

  The collision made a sort of vortex, a small but uncomfortable knot in the vast, conscious field potential that is the Infinite part of Nous. There was momentarily an intense, horrible sense of pressure and tension in the very air. The substation hummed ominously. Then, with a burst of energy that blew out every generator from Tacoma to San Diego, the roof came off. All along the Pacific slope, and as far inland as Provo, Utah, it was as dark a Christmas as even the Reverend would have wished.

  There was a pause. The noise of breaking timbers died away. The Reverend Adelburg and Mazda were looking upward frozenly, mouths open, necks outstretched. Then a gigantic hand reached in through the hole in the roof. A gigantic voice, even bigger than the hand, said in enormous and somehow Oxonian accents, “Very well. Take your old-fashioned Christmas, then.”

  * * *

  It was just before sunrise on December 21st. The Christians, who would be strangled at dawn the next day and then burned in honor of the solstice, were gibbering away in their wicker cages. There were three cages full of them. Great progress was being made in stamping out the new heresy. The Christians would make a fine bright blaze.

  The druid looked up at the cages, which were hanging from the boughs of three enormous oak trees, and nodded with satisfaction. His consort, Mahurzda, would find it a hard job strangling so many people. He’d have to help her. It would be a pleasant task.

  Once more he nodded. He tested the edge of the sickle he was carrying. Then the druid who had been—would be—would have been—the Reverend Clem Adelburg hoisted up his long white robe and clambered up into the nearest of the oak trees to cut the sacred mistletoe.

  1961. Galaxy

  WRYNECK, DRAW ME

  “Lady satellite, let me tell how love was first born in me. After the first meeting with myself, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. The arrow of love had pierced me.

  “My multiple charms enthralled me. How could I be so coldhearted? Didn’t I know how beautiful I was? Why didn’t I come back? Oh, why didn’t I come back?—But all I could see was the back of my own head.”

  Thus Jake, in a rough paraphrase of Theocritus. “Jake” is what I call the worldwide (it’s so big that relativistic effects begin to appear toward its periphery)—the worldwide computer in which I am, as far as I can tell, the sole surviving independent personality. The others, billions and billions of them, have got thinner and thinner with the passage of time, until they dropped out of Jake’s banks entirely, or have blurred and melted together like marshmallows being stirred over a fire. But I’m one of the latest comers and, I suppose, younger than most. Anyhow, I can’t seem to find anyone else.

  I wish I knew how long I’ve been here. A very long time, I think—long enough for me to get utterly fed up with making “thought flowers” and the rest of the gamut of “thought pleasures” that Jake afforded when I first came. Long enough for Jake to pass imperceptibly from being a vast storage-retrieval-potentiating installation to being a messy monster devoted to a strangely metaphysical passion for itself. A very long time.

  I wonder who I was when I was alive, out in the world, before I joined Jake. I seem to remember—but there, it’s gone. I really have no idea. I don’t even know what sex I was. The nearest I can come to memory is something about a pall of poison that had spread out beyond the orbit of the earth. Faced with their zero choices, no wonder human beings chose to become sentient, and more or less gratified, units in Jake’s memory banks!

  Has Jake turned to its “I love me” attitude because it’s incredibly bored? Or is it because there’s nobody else for it to fall in love with? I don’t know which it is, or whether something quite different is involved—but I feel very strongly that I’d better keep out of Jake’s way.

  I keep wondering who I was. I could find out, of course—I might even be able to reconstitute myself in a ghostlike physical form. But such a use of power would immediately make Jake notice me. It just isn’t worthwhile. I prefer to stay what I am at present, though that doesn’t amount to much. A mouse wandering in a hollowed-out cheese, a thought rattling around in the big mechanical brain, comes pretty close to it.

  * * *

  Later: I just had a most disconcerting and unpleasant thought: Suppose I’m Jake? I shall have to meditate about this.

  * * *

  Later: No, I don’t think so. I remember my shock when I first realized that Jake had fallen in love with itself. There’s a world of difference between what’s left of my personality and Jake’s dreary madness. My main affekt is curiosity, plus a certain wan drive to survive. But Jake is wholeheartedly bent on wooing, winning, and enjoying the ultimate consummation with itself. Since it can put all the remaining resources of the planet into the endeavor, there may be fireworks. Was ever love so little fun? Poor Jake!

  For myself, I feel more than ever like a thought hunting for somebody to think it. Life within the computer is the ultimate speculation on personal identity.

  I wonder what it’s like outside now. Have Jake’s continuing activities increased the density and extent of the pall around what us ed to be called mother earth? It would be reasonable to think so: the power to maintain a billion billion personalities in Jake had to come from somewhere, and though they’ve all blurred together, they must still require much energy. The pall would be broken through now and then by breakthroughs of glaring solar radiation, unshielded now by the protective ozone layer of mother earth’s atmosphere. Or have things somehow got stabilized
so that a little of the foison and plenty, the beauty and delight of the natural world, has been able to re-establish itself?

  All I can do is ask rhetorical questions. I could create “thought organs” for myself, I suppose, but they would not be very accurate and, in any case, wouldn’t operate outside Jake’s admittedly capacious confines.

  But I realize one thing now; that I have another affeckt, in the psychological sense of the word, besides a dim curiosity and a dim wish to survive, and this one is much the strongest of the three. There’s no dimness about this feeling. I hate humanity.

  Yes, I hate it. And if this word seems rather strong, considering my wraithlike and tenuous existence, yet let it stand. Hate.

  Throughout its long existence, humanity has carried on a love affair with itself. This hasn’t, of course, prevent ed them from murdering, torturing, raping, incinerating, and starving each other. Indeed, the millennia-long infatuation seems to have added fuel to their self-directed viciousness. I don’t intend to draw up a bill of particulars, but I wish I could spit in humanity’s collective face.

  Well, never mind that. But I wish I had some sort of timing device. My biological clocks are gone, of course, and there are no orienting cues from the external world. In the treacly flow of events here I am aware of succession, but not of duration. I could make a “thought-clock”—or thought clypshydra, sundial, or other measuring device—but I’m afraid the diversion of power from Jake’s foredoomed self-pursuit might make Jake notice me. Polyphemus and Galatea. I’d better not.

  I’m glad that I did create, and have held on to ever since I thought it into being, a “thought thought-detector”. This is how I know so much about Jake’s mental processes.

  Later: A lot has been going on. Jake’s mental noises have been unescapable. J. has been going through its memory banks with unflagging persistence. And fast as its searches are, it has taken the mechanical marvel a very long time. When the search finally ended, there was a pause (I don’t know of what duration), and then J. began to fill its inner environment with poetry.

  Erotic poetry, of course. In the fashion of all lovers through all the ages, Jake had turned to verse to bring its beloved to it. Jake gave out with odes, sonnets, madrigals, triolets, epithalamia. The whole enormous computer establishment must have rung with it, like a clanging bell, and the output shows no sign of slackening.

  Since Jake has all the poetry of all the ages to draw on, some of it is pretty good—or perhaps I should say, a pretty good imitation of the pretty good. Actually, Jake’s composite personality has no taste. It’s blurred and messy, like the nondescript shade of brown you get when you stir all the colors in the paint box up together.

  Most of the poetry is in English, with Italian a close second (Dante, I suppose). In English, Jake runs to paraphrases of Shakespeare: “For in my sweet thought I would be forgot/If thinking on me then should make me woe,” and Keats: “My warm, white, lucent thousand-pleasured breast,” besides a lot of lesser poets and a lot of versification that is, I suppose, original.

  Since Jake has all the recorded languages of the entire earth to draw on, there are also what seem to be Japanese haiku, Chinese folk songs, French chansons, Spanish reconcillas, Russian chastushka, and I don’t know what all. There is probably some amatory verse in Ainu, and if there is, I am sure Jake is using it.

  Jake seems to be finishing up with a huge glob in the European koine that has been the dominant language in the EEC for the last eight hundred years. I wonder how long this has been going on. It seems like days and days. Any curiosity I had about Jake’s poetic abilities has long ago been satisfied.

  Later: The verse making finally stopped. There came a pause, a breathless, expectant pause. Jake was waiting for an answer from itself.

  None, of course, was forthcoming. (Unless the computer can manage a satisfactory split in its personality, none ever will be.) Finally J. began another protracted rummaging through its memory banks. I think—but am not quite certain—that it was going through all the data on advice to the lovelorn that its memory banks contained. I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought I was in for another torrent of poetry. But I began to feel rather cold.

  Cold, cold and dark. An increasing blackness. All services to the now-fused individualities within Jake—the services that Jake had been originally created to provide—all services had ceased. I was losing consciousness. It occurred to me, as I blacked out, that Jake had had a quarrel with itself. I was being annihilated because of a lover’s tiff. It was a ridiculous way to go.

  I died. (If it is asked how anything as thin and tenuous as I am, a mere sentient point, can speak of dying, the answer is that the point had ceased being sentient.) I had ceased to exist, even in the qualified sense I had existed before. It didn’t hurt at all. There was no body to be hurt. It was certainly an easy, if ridiculous, way to die. But I think I really died earlier, when I first became a part of Jake’s memory banks.

  Later: Things seem back to normal. I came out of the deep freeze without any distress. But I wonder what the messy monster will try next. There’s a sense of preparation in the air.

  I believe that what I thought was a lover’s tiff was in fact a deliberate attempt on Jake’s part to waken love in itself for itself by being cold—withdrawing from itself. The computer’s equivalent of being “hard to get.” It’s a time-tested, obvious ploy that half the personalities within Jake must have tried to employ when they were alive. It didn’t work, of course. But there must be a lot more data on what to do in love difficulties in J.’s memory banks. I can only wait and see what it does next.

  My “thought thought-detector” is picking up something that sounds like “Me jinklo, me jinkli, me tover, me pori. Me kokosh, me catro, ada, ada, me kamav!” It certainly sounds like jibberish, but the computer has access to a lot of languages I don’t know. This doesn’t seem to be poetry, though it’s being chanted. It’s already been repeated a dozen times…

  “Me jinklo, me jinkli” is running through Jake’s mentation as inescapably as, to quote my great-grandmother, “Silent Night” rings out over public address systems at Christmastime. The old lady lived to be two hundred and three and was a dedicated diarist.

  Odd, that I can remember being told as a child what great-grandmother had said or written, and yet don’t know what sex I was as a child! “Blindly the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy,” Browne said, and where my recollections are concerned, he certainly was right.

  “Me jinklo” is fading away, but Jake isn’t waiting the usual wait to see what the results of its chanting are. It seems to be going directly into another ambit, something that involves a fluttering and screeching. It’s a—wait, now—it’s a bird. A medium-sized bird, with rather pretty brown, gray and buff spotted plumage. But it’s writhing its neck about and hissing like a snake, which rather detracts from the effect.

  I can’t quite make out—oh, here come some of the servo-mechanisms. They’re tying the bird to a wheel, spread-eagled, and the wheel is beginning to spin horizontally. The rim of the wheel is glowing, and now it bursts into flame. (I trust this is what is actually happening: I can’t see any of it, and derive my knowledge from Jake’s thoughts.) Now there’s something about laurel leaves, salt, and libations. All this seems dreadfully familiar. There’s chanting going on in the background. I’ve encountered this before.

  Later: It was thickheaded of me not to have realized before what the computer was up to. The chanting was an incantation, the wryneck bound to a fire wheel was a love charm, and the salt and laurel leaves were an attempt to coerce the beloved by making him waste away until he—in this case, it—relented. Jake lifted the whole thing from the pages of Theocritus. I imagine the “me jinklo” bit was some sort of love spell too.

  I suppose I’ll be in for a long bout of love magic, until Jake finally decides it doesn’t work and tries something else. One curiosity I do have is about the computer’s image of itself. Does it see itself as a beautiful young
girl? As a plain, fat, middle-aged man or woman? A handsome young man? Or is it, in its own mind, nothing but an unappeased longing? My knowledge of Jake’s thoughts is somewhat spotty, despite my “thought thought-detector.” A mild curiosity, and a profound hatred of human beings, are the only emotions I have left.

  The chanting is giving way to bonging, the bonging to what is probably bull roarers, and the bull roarers to an indrawn silence. I imagine Jake is meditating—no, it’s started up again. I have the impression of fifty people all gabbling at once, and at the tops of their voices. Well, my demented host has thousands of years of love charms to get through. J. is persevering, if nothing else.

  * * *

  Later: At last, when I really thought I’d have to unthink my “thought thought-detector,” Jake has shut up. A blessed mental silence. But if it’s not going to be love charms or erotic poetry, what will it be? Jake can’t be giving up.

  I begin to smell something. (I mean, I feel Jake smelling it.) It’s a warm, yeasty, buttery smell, like home baking. Very good, really. But I don’t see how Jake’s love quest ties in with this.

  Oh. Of course. The computer, having exhausted love magic, has picked up the homeliest of adages, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and is acting on it.

  The computer establishment is flooded with delicious odors. Mountains, torrents, avalanches of pastry, fancy baking, and the trickier sorts of home-baked bread are pouring forth. Enough to feed an army. Condes, napoleons, petit fours, madeleines, gaufrettes, bagels, pain d’é pice, brioche, salt-rising bread, babas, Sally Lunns—I can’t begin to enumerate them all. If Jake’s beloved existed except as an alter ego, it would be suffocated under this abundance. Like a man drowning in a vat of whipped cream.

  How “real” the mountains of pastry and sweetmeats are, I have at present no way of knowing. Jake certainly admires them very much, commenting favorably on their brownness, crispness, sweetness, lightness, and enticing perfumes of butter, caramel, vanilla, and rum. Question: Does Jake’s having elected to try this particular way to a man’s heart mean that J. thinks of itself as a man? As a woman? Or does it have any particular ideas on the subject? On reflection, I find I don’t much care about Jake’s mental processes. Actually, I’m sick of Jake.