by James Gunn
“Who's in charge of the project to run the chief of the Kampuskops off campus?” Gavin asked.
He found himself looking at a vast expanse of yellow skin that said, “Om.”
“Last guy tried that got shot down in the middle of University Drive,” said the girl next to the bald fellow. “Nobody can outshoot the chief.”
A large man on the other side of the bald head turned to Gavin. “You some kind of nut?”
“Om,” said the bald head.
“I think he's a spy,” said the fellow on Gavin's right.
“I think he's trying to stir up something, get people in trouble,” said the girl on Gavin's left.
“He doesn't believe in the stars,” said the girl behind him.
Gavin spread out his palms in a gesture of innocence. “I'm new here.”
They glared at him. He tried to make himself inconspicuous.
A blast of sound came from the stage to prevent further interrogation. The lights came on full and blindingly. They were focused on the stage where a rock band seemed small against a background of a Greek facade with fluted pillars and a large pedestaled doorway stretching across the wide marble stage to wings at each side. Five guitarists, a drummer, and an electronic pianist were dressed in gold shorts, gold half-boots, and glittering gold jackets parted to expose naked chests. The amplifiers screamed with the agony of tortured strings.
In front of the shoulder-tall stage stood a row of black-uniformed Kampuskops, elbow-to-elbow, nightsticks thumping into their hands in time with the music, holsters thrust forward for a quick draw, visors lowered from their helmets to hide all but their mouths and chins. The black reflective visors dehumanized them; the imagination painted in alien eyes or horrible disfigurements. They seemed half-monster, half-robot, and Gavin saw them as naked power, the ultimate arm of tyranny.
At the north end of the theater a group of girls entered the wide aisle. They were dressed in old sweaters and skirts and canvas shoes, and they came running and tumbling, doing backflips and cartwheels down the aisle in front of the stage, uttering little cries and squeals of joy. As they reached the center of the amphitheater, they turned into the sodded area within the semicircle of curved benches. On their chests, in script, was written the word “Cal,” and a line forming the “1” swept back under the syllable for emphasis.
Behind them a group of young men in sweaters and jeans pulled a float. It held a tall cylindrical shape made of silvered strips by the thousands; they blew in the breeze like streams of water revealing a shape inside the cylinder but concealing its identity.
The rock band screamed in protest. The float drew opposite the center of the stage and stopped. The silver strands dropped away. Inside was a girl dressed in a long white gown. A coronet of white and yellow flowers had been woven into her dark hair. Gavin had the feeling that she was beautiful.
She waited, her back half-turned to the audience, her eyes looking at the far end of the stage. Then she stepped forward from the float onto the stage. The band tormented its instruments.
Suddenly the music stopped. In the silence that fell over the stage and audience alike, a spotlight picked out a figure above the marble structure behind the stage, as white and dramatic as an avenging angel. It was dressed like a Kampuskop, but all in white, with starbursts of gold on breast pockets and epaulets. Part of the distant face and one of the hands glittered oddly in the spotlight as the figure descended slowly toward the mortals below.
Gavin laughed. It sounded loud in the silence. “God out of the machine!” he said.
The people around him glanced at him in annoyance and then looked away quickly, as if they didn't want to be associated with him in any way. The figure descending toward the stage seemed to hesitate, as if searching the audience beyond the glare of the spotlight, and then the slow descent began again.
Somebody snickered, and in a distant part of the audience someone else laughed. But in general the spell held, and as the figure got close enough to see more clearly, it didn't look as funny to Gavin. It wasn't human; not all of it, anyway. Large parts of the face and the left hand had been replaced by plastic and metal. One eye was human; the other was a staring marble of tinted plastic set in a clear-plastic socket. Part of one cheek and half a jaw had been replaced, and a third of the forehead and skull. Underneath the clear replacement skull could be seen the gray convolutions of the brain; underneath the plastic skin of the cheek and jaw, shiny metal bones and teeth.
The creature looked like one of the transparent models beloved by the anatomy lab, but obscenely afflicted with a disease that made it break out in skin and hair. Or a person rotting away into something alien.
In spite of the horror of the creature's appearance, it alighted solidly on the stage and spread its arms to the audience. Then it turned, apparently vigorous and strong, toward the waiting bride. The rock band thundered a clash of chords. The audience exploded into applause and cheers.
Again the band fell silent; the audience stilled. The creature took two steps toward the bride; she took two steps toward her monstrous groom. Her movement turned her toward the audience. Gavin saw her face for the first time.
He recognized her. He knew her. He could never forget that face. “Jenny!” he shouted.
The girl stopped. She turned, trying to peer into the audience against the brilliance of the lights. The creature turned also, its plastic left hand thrust out toward the audience like a command. The fingers twitched.
“A stranger is among us,” the voice boomed out mechanically. It needed no microphone to be heard in the far reaches of the amphitheater. “He must not damage our moment of celebration, our ceremony of reunion. Send him forward!”
“Here he is,” shouted the man on Gavin's right.
“I didn't like him from the first,” said the girl on Gavin's left.
Hands grabbed Gavin, lifted him above the heads of the crowd. He was passed down the audience toward the front aisle, fingers pinching away strips of cloth and bits of flesh as he kicked and squirmed futilely to regain control of his fate. At the front, faceless kops caught his arms and half-carried him to the stage. In a moment he faced their half-human leader.
Gavin stared incredulously at the leprous face. Up close, only the metal and plastic parts looked real; humanity was the disease. One bloodshot human eye and one plastic eye stared at him. Gavin saw through the clear-plastic eye to the twisted lucite tendrils that carried some kind of visual message to the obscene movements of the gray cortex revealed beneath the plastic skull.
The human eye seemed to open wider as it looked at Gavin, and the human half of the creature's mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “Gavin,” it said.
Gavin felt surprise.
“Gavin?” the girl said. She turned to look up into his face; finally, it was Jenny. “Why, it is Gavin! What are you doing here?”
“That's what I should be asking you,” Gavin said, but he knew. There on the muddy bank of the Kaw, she had been terrified, but not so terrified that she had not been able to slip away from her guard. Even before the shooting began, she must have begun to run through the darkness, and she hadn't stopped running until she reached the Coast. Here in the birthplace of revolution, on this strangely quieted campus, she occupied the ritual position of Homecoming Queen, and she was going to marry the chief of the Kampuskops in a glorious public ceremony intended to wed students and authority. It was a political matter, like the marriage between the heirs to rival kingdoms.
All the while, Gavin could not more than glance away from the monster who had called his name.
Its human lip curled higher on one cheek. The plastic side of its face was immobile, and the contrast was frightening. “You don't recognize me in my apotheosis?” Now its voice did not carry beyond the immediate intimate group on the stage. “I am Gregory.”
“Gregory?” Gavin said.
“Gregory transformed! Gregory exalted!”
Gavin began to understand. Gregory had been terribly in
jured, fearfully maimed, in the attack on the generating plant. Doctors there and then here had put him back together, replacing parts shot away or badly shattered with plastics and metal. They had brought him back from death. That was power, and Gregory always had gravitated toward power. He had switched sides effortlessly. He had joined what he saw as the most powerful of the forces available. He became a Kampuskop. Now he was leader of a force greater than he had imagined. He had made the kops more than a token; he had recruited men capable of his own kind of brutality; he had armed them, outlawed political activity by the students, and compensated them with circuses like this.
“I've seen a lot of things since that night by the river,” Gavin said. “I know places that could grow new limbs and parts for those you lost.”
“Lost?” Gregory laughed. It was a low mechanical sound that rumbled across the stage like artificial thunder. “The doctors put me back together better than ever. Look!” He took a nightstick from the nearest kop in his artificial left hand. The fingers tightened on it. The stick disintegrated into splinters and wires.
The waiting audience, unable to make out what was happening on stage, applauded the show.
“I wouldn't change back for all the little squealing coeds on the campus,” he said. “Before, I was merely strong. Now I've got power!” He shook the splintered wood from his plastic hand. “I've also got Jenny. And I've got you.” The crooked smile grew more crooked.
Gavin realized that he had been wrong. The wedding was more than political expediency, more, even, than a mating of beauty and the beast. It was the consummation of Gregory's frustrated desires for the one girl who had resisted him and the one man who had stood in his way without acknowledging his physical superiority.
“I could castrate you here upon the stage,” Gregory said, “using only my good left hand. That would be appropriate to the occasion, I think, and the audience would appreciate it almost as much as I would.”
“I don't want anything like that at my wedding,” Jenny said.
Gregory's human eye blinked, and his artificial eye stared. Perhaps they saw different realities.
The reality Gavin experienced was a brief gratitude for Jenny's intervention, which faded before the realization that she had not spoken up because of him. “You're going through with this abomination?” he said, and he knew that she was. He had never known her. She was fascinated by Gregory, by what he represented, by the very monstrousness of him. What she had feared and desired had come to pass; she had come to enjoy what Gregory did. His sadism and her masochism had come to their proper meeting.
“You want to save him?” Gregory asked.
Jenny shook her head. “What do I care about him? He belongs to the past.” For Jenny the past was dead.
Gregory believed her. “My sweet captive!” he said. “My tender slave!” He turned to the kops who held Gavin's arms. “Take him into the wings until the ceremony is over! Make him watch! Don't let him look away! And don't give him a chance to escape! He is dessert.”
So, Gavin thought, he had come all the way across the country for this. From within a small doorway, out of sight of the audience at the left of the stage, Gavin watched helplessly as Gregory took Jenny's left hand in his and raised it in a gesture something like that of a victor in a prizefight. “This woman I wed,” he said in a voice that carried to the last row of benches. “In the name of unity between students and administration, in the name of cooperation between all elements which go to make up a great university, in the name of the power we will wield together not only over this campus but the city that surrounds this campus and the entire bay area, and perhaps, who knows, over the state itself, I take this woman for my own, to do with as I will.”
He turned to Jenny. “And you, Jenny, do you accept me as your mate and master? Do you put control of your fate and body into my hands?” The fingers of his plastic hand twitched.
Jenny nodded. That was enough. The audience applauded and cheered wildly. It was a savage rite. They should be surrounded by a jungle, Gavin thought, tensing his muscles against the grip of his guards. As the audience reaction began to fade, Gregory held up his right hand. It seemed pale and weak by comparison. “This marriage will be publicly consummated,” he shouted.
“No!” Jenny said. She tried to turn away, but as Gregory released her hand, he caught the neck of her white gown with his plastic hand and ripped it from her body. She stood cowering in front of him, naked and white upon the stage.
Gavin knew now that he had never loved her. How can you love someone you do not know? But he had been close to her, and he struggled against the hands that held him, knowing the shame that Jenny felt, remembering how she had dreaded the light, and hating the strange mixture of fear and fascination upon her face now.
With the same left hand, Gregory ripped away the front of his uniform jacket. The white cloth fell from his chest; the pattern of mutilation apparent on his face was duplicated down his body. His entire left arm was plastic, and part of his shoulder. Almost half his chest had been blown away; inside, the transparent plastic organs moved obscenely. Some of the organs were dark red and moist; others were glassy. A pulsating plastic heart pumped blood through plastic arteries.
By then Gregory's white pants also were on the stage floor. The left leg was normal; the right leg was plastic, covering shiny metal bones. And as Gregory turned to reveal himself fully to the audience, Gavin saw that even his genitals were plastic.
“What pleasure in that?” he thought as Gregory put his plastic arm around Jenny's back and lifted her effortlessly into the air. And Gavin struggled with his guards, even as he understood that the real center of sex is not in the loins but in the head.
Slowly Gregory lowered Jenny onto his plastic chest.
Her head was thrown back in a final gesture of aversion; her hands pushed futilely at his chest. It was the rape of humanity by the machine.
No, Gavin corrected himself in the midst of his futile effort to go to Jenny's rescue, that was too easy; it was Gregory's humanity at fault, not the mechanism that made it possible. The tragedy was humanity's mechanical rape of itself.
At the consummation of this savage public rite, almost as if it were a part of the ceremony itself, the stone floor of the stage disintegrated under Gregory's feet. Gregory was lifted into the air, still clasping Jenny in his plastic embrace. Rock splinters and slivers whistled through the air like shrapnel. The rock band was scythed down.
The concussion reached Gavin. His guards were shaken away. As Gavin was throwing himself to the floor, he saw Jenny and her terrible lover disappear into the hole in the stage left by the explosion. Almost simultaneously he thought, “Poor Jenny!” and “They did it!” He exulted in the indomitable anarchy of uncowed students, who had not acquiesced to this unholy matrimony, who had prepared an ultimate protest to the dramatic tyranny Gregory had planned; and he knew them for irresponsible romantics whose only useful contribution was a basic unwillingness to go along with anything.
Stone darts sprayed past Gavin. The floor was still vibrating from the explosion. Something hot and sticky spurted on his hand. The kop on his right clasped to his throat a hand that was already dead.
The sound of gunfire echoed from stone surfaces. In front of the stage, the helmeted, visored kops formed a wedge that tried to carve a corridor through walls of student bodies. Nightsticks rose and fell like flails or thrust forward like short spears. Automatics fired blindly into bodies pressed close. The black group made some progress toward the south exit, but for every foot it advanced, a kop was lost to a bullet, a club, or clawing hands.
It was Ragnarok, the campus Armageddon toward which events had moved for forty years, storing up rage and frustration and violence toward the final explosion. Here order made its last stand; here anarchy presented its final negation to tyranny. Here the world ended, Gavin thought.
But he was wrong. The battle surged south, uncertain, inconclusive. The amphitheater was left behind, filled with th
e groans of the wounded, the blood of the dead. Gavin tried to stand up, but his right leg collasped under him. He looked down at it. Blood was seeping through the cloth that covered the thigh.
He crawled to the edge of the ragged gap in the stage and looked down into the hole where he had seen Gregory and Jenny disappear. They were still there, upright, staring at him, locked in a last embrace. Gavin pulled his head halfway back, thinking for one crazy moment that they had survived. But they were dead.
Jenny's body was unmarked. Gregory's plastic arm had pulled so tight around her that her ribs were broken, and perhaps her back as well. Gregory's plastic leg kept them upright through some mechanical miracle. His fleshy leg had been shattered, but the plastic had stayed strong and true, and the plastic heart had pumped away until his blood was gone.
He looked up toward the red-tinged clouds, his human eye closed but his plastic eye staring as if it still were sending messages to a dead brain. A final rictus had twisted his plastic lips upward, so that now he smiled on both sides.
Gavin found a piece of Jenny's dress. He tore it into two pieces. One of them he folded into a pad over the wound in his thigh; the other he used to tie it in place, feeling grateful that the piece of stone had missed the arteries. He crawled to the steps and edged down them, seated, like a small child. At the last one, he pulled himself upright by the edge of the stage and shuffled south, picking his way among the bodies.
Just beyond the theater, a small tree had been trampled by struggling feet until it broke off near the base. Gavin lowered himself gingerly to the ground and methodically began stripping the tree of branches and leaves. When he pushed himself upright again, he had a passable crutch.
He hobbled down Gayley Road, past Keelberger Field and the stadium parking lots, between the Law Building and International House, and through gates that stood open to the night. Halfway across the cleared ground that surrounded the campus wall, he turned and looked at the University for the final time.