A great majority, knowing that the facts were so ready at hand, had never touched an IWM 1000, not even out of curiosity. They did not know how to read or write. They were ignorant of the most elementary things, and it did not matter to them. They felt happy at having one less worry, and they enjoyed the other technological advances more. With the IWM 1000, you could write any type of literature, compose music, and even paint pictures. Creative works were disappearing because anybody, with time and sufficient patience, could make any work similar to and even superior to one made by artists of the past without having to exert the brain or feel anything strange or abnormal.
Some people spent time getting information from the IWM 1000 just for the pleasure of knowing something. Some did it to get out of some predicament, and others asked it things of no importance whatsoever, simply for the pleasure of having someone say something to them, even though it might just be something from their trivial, boring world.
“What is etatex?”
“What does hybrid mean?”
“How do you make a chocolate cake?”
“What does Beethoven’s Pastorale mean?”
“How many inhabitants are there actually in the world?”
“Who was Viriatus?”
“What is the distance from the Earth to Jupiter?”
“How can you get rid of freckles?”
“How many asteroids have been discovered this year?”
“What is the function of the pancreas?”
“When was the last world war?”
“How old is my neighbor?”
“What does reciprocal mean?”
Modulations of the voice fell on some supersensitive electronic membrane, connected with the brain of the machine, and computed immediately the requested information, which was not always the same because, according to the tone of voice, the machine computed the data concisely or with necessary references.
Sometimes two intellectuals would start to talk, and when one of them had a difference of opinion, he would consult his machine. He would present the problem from his own perspective, and the machines would talk and talk. Objections were made, and many times these did not come from the intellectuals but from the machines, who tried to convince each other. The men who had begun the discussion would listen, and when they tired of listening, they would be thinking which of two machines was going to get the last word because of the power of the respective generators.
Lovers would make the machines conjugate all the tenses of the verb to love, and they would listen to romantic songs. In offices and administrative buildings tape-recorded orders were given, and the IWM 1000 would complete the details of the work. Many people got in the habit of talking only to their own machines; therefore, nobody contradicted them because they knew how the machine was going to respond, or because they believed that rivalry could not exist between a machine and a human being. A machine could not accuse anyone of ignorance: they could ask anything.
Many fights and domestic arguments were conducted through the IWM 1000. The contestants would ask the machine to say to their opponent the dirtiest words and the vilest insults at the highest volume. And, when they wanted to make peace, they could make it at once because it was the IWM 1000 and not they who said those words.
People began to feel really bad. They consulted their IWM 1000s, and the machines told them that their organisms could not tolerate one more dose of pep pills because they had reached the limit of their tolerance. In addition, they computed that the possibilities of suicide were on the increase, and that a change in lifestyle had become necessary.
The people wanted to return to the past, but it was too late. Some tried to put aside their IWM 1000, but they felt defenseless. Then they consulted the machines to see if there was some place in the world where there was nothing like the IWM 1000; and the machines gave information and details about a remote place called Takandia. Some people began to dream about Takandia. They gave the IWM 1000 to those who had only an IWM 100. They began to go through a series of strange actions. They went to museums; they spent time in the sections which contained books looking at something that intrigued them a great deal—something that they wanted to have in their hands—little, shabby syllabaries in which the children of past civilizations learned slowly to read poring over symbols, for which they used to attend a designated site called a school. The symbols were called letters; the letters were divided into syllables; and the syllables were made up of vowels and consonants. When the syllables were joined together, they made words, and the words were oral and written….When these ideas became common knowledge, some people were very content again because these were the first facts acquired for themselves and not through the IWM 1000.
Many left the museums to go out to the few antique shops that remained, and they did not stop until they found syllabaries, which went from hand to hand in spite of their high prices. When the people had the syllabaries, they started to decipher them: a-e-i-o-u, ma me mi mo mu, pa pe pi po pu. It turned out to be easy and fun. When they knew how to read, they obtained all the books they could. They were few, but they were books: The Effect of Chlorophyll on Plants, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, One Hundred Recipes from the Kitchen, The History of the Crusades….They began to read, and, when they could obtain facts for themselves, they began to feel better. They stopped taking pep pills. They tried to communicate their new sensations to their peers. Some looked at them with suspicion and distrust and labeled them lunatics. Then these few people hastened to buy tickets to Takandia.
After a jet, they took a slow boat, then a canoe. They walked many kilometers and arrived at Takandia. There they found themselves surrounded by horrible beings, who did not wear even modest loincloths. They lived in the tops of trees; they ate raw meat because they were not familiar with fire; and they painted their bodies with vegetable dyes.
The people who had arrived in Takandia realized that, for the first time in their lives, they were among true human beings, and they began to feel happy. They looked for friends; they yelled as the others did; and they began to strip off their clothes and throw them away among the bushes. The natives of Takandia forgot about the visitors for a few minutes to fight over the discarded clothing.
The House of Compassionate Sharers
MICHAEL BISHOP
Michael Bishop (1945– ) is an influential US science fiction and fantasy writer who sold his first story, “Piñon Fall,” to Galaxy in 1969 and has gone on to produce several award-winning novels and stories in a career spanning almost five decades. These works include the Nebula Award–winning novel No Enemy but Time, the Nebula Award–winning novelette “The Quickening,” the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award–winning novel Unicorn Mountain, and the Shirley Jackson Award–winning story “The Pile” (based on notes discovered on his late son Jamie’s computer). He has also received four Locus Awards and his work has been nominated for numerous Hugo Awards.
Bishop’s many story collections include The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective (2012), edited by Michael H. Hutchins, and the forthcoming Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories. Bishop has edited seven anthologies, including the Locus Award–winning Light Years and Dark and A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ (2007). His latest anthology, Passing for Human (2009), was coedited with Steven Utley.
Bishop has also written a novel for young people (“whatever their age”), Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, with pen-and-ink illustrations by Orion Zangara. Since 2012, Fairwood Press, in conjunction with Bishop’s own imprint there, Kudzu Planet Productions, has been releasing revised editions of his novels about twice a year. These include Brittle Innings, Ancient of Days, Who Made Stevie Crye?, Count Geiger’s Blues, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, and Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.
About “The House of Compassionate Sharers,” Bishop writes, “After selling stories to Galaxy, F&SF, and Worlds of If, I began focusing on Damon Knight’s hardcover anthology se
ries, Orbit, as well as on Silverberg’s New Dimensions and Terry Carr’s Universe. Because I especially admired Knight’s story ‘Masks’ (1968), I used it as a basis for ‘The House of Compassionate Sharers,’ which also has its roots in some of the Japanese fiction I was then reading: Kawabata, Endo, Mishima, and others.” Knight promptly rejected what Bishop calls “a bloated version that I trimmed and restructured, using Damon’s comments as guides.” After Bishop placed a revised version with a new magazine called Cosmos edited by David Hartwell, four different year’s-best anthologies reprinted the story, which Bishop described as “a ‘hat trick’ no other story of mine has ever duplicated.”
The version of “The House of Compassionate Sharers” (1977) reprinted here—still edgy, timeless, and unique—completes Bishop’s editing process by trimming a last eight hundred words since its appearance in Cosmos.
THE HOUSE OF COMPASSIONATE SHARERS
Michael Bishop
In the Port Iranani Galenshall, I awoke in the room Diderits called the Black Pavilion. I was an engine, a system, a series of myoelectric and neuromechanical components, and the Accident responsible for this enamel-hard enfleshing lay two full M-years in the past. This morning was an anniversary of sorts. By now I should have adjusted. And I had. I had reached a full accommodation with myself. Narcissistic, one could say. Which was the trouble.
“Dorian? Dorian Lorca?”
The voice belonged to KommGalen Diderits, wet and breathy even though it came from a metal speaker to which the sable drapes of the dome were attached. I stared up into the ring of curtains.
“Dorian, it’s target day. Answer, please.”
“I’m here, my galen.” I arose, listening to the quasi-musical ratcheting that I make when I move, a sound like the concatenation of tiny bells or the purring of a stope-car. The sound echoes through the porcelain plates, metal vertebrae, and osteoid polymers holding me together, and no one else can hear it.
“Rumai’s here, Dorian. May she enter?”
“If I agreed, I suppose so.”
“Damn it, Dorian, don’t feel you’re bound by honor to see her! We’ve spent the last several brace-weeks preparing you to resume normal human contact.” Diderits began to list: “Chameleodrene treatments, hologramic substitution, stimulus-response therapy. You ought to want Rumai to come in to you, Dorian.”
Ought. My brain was—and remains—my own, but the body Diderits and the other kommgalens had given me had “instincts” and “tropisms” specific to itself, ones whose templates had a mechanical instead of a biological origin. What I ought to feel, in human terms, and what I felt as the occupant of a total prosthesis resembled each other about as much as blood and oil.
“Do you want her to come in, Dorian?”
“I do.” And I did. After all the biochemical and psychiatric preparation, I wanted to witness my own reaction. Still sluggish from a drug, I had no idea how Rumai’s arrival would affect me.
At a parting of the pavilion’s draperies, two or three meters from my couch, Rumai Montieth, my wife, appeared. Her garment of overlapping latex scales, glossy black in color, was a hauberk revealing only her hands, face, and hair. Rumai’s dress was one of Diderits’s deceits, or “preparations”: he wanted me to see Rumai as little different from myself, a creature as well assembled and synapsed as the engine I had become. But her hands, face, and hair—well, nothing could disguise their primitive humanity, and revulsion swept over me like a tide.
“Dorian?” And her voice: wet, breath-driven, expelled through moistened lips.
I turned away. “No,” I said to the speaker overhead. “It hasn’t worked, my galen. Every part of me cries out against this.”
Diderits said nothing. Was he still out there? Or had he tried to bestow on Rumai and me a privacy I didn’t want?
“Disassemble me,” I urged him. “Link me to the control systems of a delta-state vessel and let me go out from Miroste for good. You don’t want a zombot among you, Diderits—an unhappy anproz. You’re all tormenting me!”
“And you, us,” Rumai said. I faced her. “As you’re very aware, Dorian, as you’re very aware…Take my hand.”
“No.” I didn’t shrink away, I merely refused.
“Here. Take it.”
Fighting my disgust, I seized her hand, twisted it over, and showed her its back. “Look.”
“I see it, Dor.” I was hurting her.
“Surfaces, that’s all you see. Look at this wen.” I pinched the growth. “That’s sebum, fatty matter. And the smell, if only you could—”
Rumai drew back, and I sought to quell a mental nausea almost as profound as my regret….To venture out from Miroste seemed the only answer. Around me I wanted machinery—thrumming machinery—and the sterile, actinic emptiness of vacuum. I wanted to become the probeship Dorian Lorca, a clear step up from my position as prince consort to the governor of Miroste.
“Let me out,” Rumai commanded the head of the Port Iranani Galenshall, and Diderits released her from the pavilion. Again, I dwelt alone in one of the few private chambers of a surgical complex given over to adapting Civi Korps personnel to our leprotic planet’s fume-filled mine shafts. The Galenshall was also used to patch up these civkis after their implanted respirators had atrophied, almost beyond saving, the muscles of their chests and lungs.
Including administrative personnel, Kommfleet officials, and the Civi Korps workers in the mines, over half a million people lived on Miroste in the year of which I write. Diderits answered for the health of all those not assigned to the outlying territories.
Had I not been the husband of Miroste’s first governor, he might have let me die along with the seventeen “expendables” on tour with me in the Fetneh District when the roof of the Haft Paykar diggings collapsed. But Rumai had made Diderits’s duty plain to him, and I am as I am because we had the resources in Port Iranani and Diderits obeyed his governor.
Alone in my pavilion, I lifted my hand and heard a caroling of minute copper bells.
—
Nearly a month later, I observed, by closed-circuit TV, Rumai, Diderits, and a stranger who sat in a Galenshall conference room. This strange woman, bald but for a scalplock, wore gold silk pantaloons that gave her a clownish appearance, and a corrugated green jacket that oddly reversed that impression. Even on my monitor I could see thick sunlight spilling into their room.
“This is Wardress Kefa,” Rumai told me. I greeted her through a microphone and tested the cosmetic work of Diderits’s associates by trying to smile. “She’s from Earth, Dor, and she came because KommGalen Diderits and I asked her to.”
“Forty-six lights,” I said, touched and angry at the same time. To be constantly the focus of your friends’ attentions, especially when they have more urgent business, leads to either a corrosive cynicism or a self-effacing humility just as crippling.
“We’d like you to go back with her on Nizami when it leaves here tomorrow night,” Diderits said.
“Why?”
“Wardress Kefa came all this way to talk with us,” Rumai said. “As a final stage in your therapy, she’d like you to visit her establishment on Earth. And if this fails, Dor, I give you up. If that’s what you want, I relinquish you.” Today, Rumai wore a yellow sarong and a nun’s hood of red and orange stripes. Speaking, she averted her eyes from the monitor to stare out the high windows instead. I could not help admiring the spare aesthetics of her profile.
“Establishment? What sort of establishment?” I studied the tiny Wardress, but her appearance yielded nothing.
“The House of Compassionate Sharers,” Diderits said. “It lies in Earth’s Western Hemisphere, in North America, two hundred kilometers southwest of the gutted Urban Nucleus of Denver. One reaches it from Manitou Port by ’rail.”
“Good. I’ll have no trouble getting there. But what is this mysterious house?”
Wardress Kefa spoke: “I’d prefer that you discover its nature and purposes from me, Mr. Lorca, when we’ve arrived safe
ly under its several roofs.”
“Is it a brothel?” This question fell among my interlocutors like a stone.
“No,” Rumai said at length. “It’s a unique clinic for the treatment of unique emotional disorders.” She glanced at the Wardress, concerned that she’d said too much.
“Some call it a brothel,” Wardress Kefa admitted huskily. “Earth has become a haven of misfits and opportunists, a crossroads of Glaktik Komm influence and trade. The House wouldn’t prosper catering only to those who experience rare dissociations of feeling. Hence, a few of those who frequent the House are kommthors rich in power and finicky in their tastes. But I view them as exceptions, Governor Montieth, KommGalen Diderits. They represent a compromise that I make to carry out the work for which we first built the House.”
A moment later Rumai said, “You’re going, Dor—tomorrow night. Diderits and I will see you in three E-months.” She threw on her cloak and departed.
“Good-bye, Dorian,” Diderits said, standing.
Wardress Kefa’s keen glance felt oddly disconcerting. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed. In my monitor, the galen and the Wardress exited the conference room together. In its high windows, Miroste’s sun sang a cappella in a lemon sky.
—
I had a private berth on Nizami. I used my “nights” (because sleep no longer meant a thing to me) to prowl through the compartments of shipboard machinery not forbidden to passengers. Although I couldn’t enter the command module, I could the computer-ringed observation turret and a few corridors of auxiliary equipment necessary to maintaining a continuous probefield. In these places, I pondered the likelihood of an encephalic/neural connection to one of Kommfleet’s interstellar frigates.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 122