by Drew Ford
“It’s a death sentence for you too,” said the engineer.
“I accept the necessity.”
“Is that supposed to make me accept it too? You’re a robot. You don’t put the same value on life that I do. You’re programmed to die. No matter what your metal mind believes, you can’t be human. You can’t accept human values. You’re only a machine.”
“Yes,” said the robot demurely, “I am a machine.”
The little man stared through the glass wall, forcing back the nausea, the frustration—and the fear.
“It’s not just me,” said the man. “It’s my life. It’s everything I’ve ever done—everything I believe in. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want all this to die either. It’s important to me. I made it. That, you can’t possibly understand.”
“If you say so,” conceded the executioner, tiredly.
“I don’t understand it either,” confessed the little man.
“No,” said the robot. “You can’t. It isn’t your science. It’s your child.”
The man bridled. “Who are you to judge? What are you to judge? How can a metal creature say things like that? What’s the difference to me? My science is my child. Because I love the system I have created, is my reason devalued? Are my arguments to be discounted because I am personally involved with them?”
“Your arguments don’t matter at all. The argument is already over.”
“And the sentence passed. Who spoke for me? Who presented my arguments, my defence?”
“They were presented,” said the robot stiffly.
“And discounted. Devalued.”
“The decision was made. All the facts were taken into consideration. Every possible course of action was studied. But no chances can be taken. Asteroid Lamarck and everything which has come into contact with it, must be destroyed. The danger of infection must be eliminated.”
“They must be mad,” said the little man distantly. “Unreasoned fear couldn’t spread so far. They are not even content with taking my life. They must kill me too. They must murder as well as destroy. Surely that means they are afraid of me—of what I might say. How tenuous must their arguments be, if they dare not allow my voice to be heard?”
“They were afraid of spores,” said the robot. “You have come into close personal contact with the system. It would have been inviting the danger which they want to prevent, if they allowed you to return to Earth.”
“Are you sure? Do you believe that as well? Why didn’t they claim that my knowledge was too dangerous as well? Wouldn’t it have been far more diplomatic to have me die in an accident?
“Or is that what they will say?” added the engineer, as the thought occurred to him.
“It makes no difference,” said the robot.
“Who is it that sent you?” demanded the little man, knowing full well that he was going to get no answer from the executioner. “Who started the scare?”
“What scare?” parried the robot.
“This panic. Who spread the fear behind this decision? It didn’t just grow. It didn’t form in serious minds because of spontaneous generation. Someone put it there. Someone embarked upon a crusade. Someone wanted a lever. It’s obvious.
“I’m not stupid enough to think that anyone hates me, or that some lunatic really does believe in the danger of infection. Someone wanted a platform. Someone wanted to exploit fear, to make a crusade which could carry him along at its head. It’s politics that produced your twisted logic. It’s politics that swore you to secrecy. It’s politics that uses fear as a weapon. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. Fear doesn’t just spring into being, fully formed. It has to be spread, like a virus. It has to be nurtured, injected. It’s part of the currency of politics. Planted, grown, bought and sold.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” said the robot sensibly.
“Tell me I don’t understand,” suggested the little man, and laughed. The robot didn’t laugh.
“‘There’s no point,” said the robot, “in trying to change my mind. You can’t devalue my arguments, because the decision has already been made. The sentence has already been carried out.”
The little man walked away from the glass wall, towards the door.
“Nothing you do will help,” said the robot. “If you are going to fetch the gun from your desk, don’t bother. There’s nothing you can do. The device was planted and activated before I came here. Lamarck is already dead.”
The little man stopped and turned his head.
“I wasn’t going to fetch the gun,” he said.
The robot couldn’t smile. “Go on then,” said the executioner. “Go and do whatever you want to do.”
The little man left, and the robot turned his red eyes to the glass wall. He stood in silent contemplation, watching the silken forest. Beyond and within the silver threadwork—which was all one organism—were other organisms, other fractions of organisms. The robot did not try to see them. He was not interested.
Asteroid Lamarck began to lose orbital velocity, and started a long, slow spiral in towards the sun.
The little man held the gun in both hands. He had small, delicate hands and thin arms. The gun was heavy.
“What are you going to do?” asked the robot, quietly.
The little man peered through his thin-rimmed spectacles at the unfamiliar object which he held.
“It won’t help you to shoot me with that,” said the robot.
“What do you care whether I shoot you or not?” demanded the little man. His voice was sharp and emotional. “You’re metal. You don’t understand life. You kill, but you don’t know what you’re really doing.”
“I know what it is to live,” said the robot.
“You exist,” sneered the engineer. “You don’t know what a human life means. You don’t know what that means—” he pointed at the window in the wall—“to me, to science. You only want to kill. To kill life, to kill knowledge, to kill science. For fear.”
“We’ve been through all that.”
“What else is there to do but go through it all again? What else is there but talk, until Lamarck falls into the sun and you and I become cinders? What do you want to do?”
“It’s futile to argue.”
“Everything’s futile. I’m a condemned man. Whatever I do, it’s a waste of time. I’m a dead man. You’re a dead robot. But you don’t care.”
The executioner remained silent.
The little man raised the gun, and pointed it at one of the robot’s red eyes. For a few moments, man and metal stared at each other. The robot watched a thin, unsteady finger press the trigger of the gun.
The hands that held the gun jerked as the recoil jolted the genetic engineer. There was a loud bang. The bullet clanged off the metal ceiling, ricocheted into the window, but the glass was unbroken.
“It’s pointless,” said the robot softly. Somehow, after the report of the gun, his calmness seemed plaintive.
The little man fired again, squeezing the muscles round his eyes and mouth as he struggled to keep his hands still. The bullet splashed the robot’s electronic eye into tiny red fragments. The metal man moaned, and went over backwards. There was a moment when the balance adjustment in his double-jointed knees compensated for the impact, and held the robot in a backward kneeling position. Then the moaning ended in a sharp gasp, and the engineer winced as the robot fell full length on to the floor.
The dead robot gave a mock laugh, which rattled harshly out of the uncoordinated vocal apparatus. The engineer stared at the crumpled heap of metal. It was no longer a parody of a human form. It was just metal. It was dead.
The little man walked slowly over to the large window. He fired from the waist, gunfighter style. The bullet bounced off the glass and hit him in the thigh. His face went pale, and he winced, but he did not fall. He fired three more times, and the third time the glass cracked. But there was still no breach in the glass wall.
/> The engineer felt tears easing from the corners of his eyes, and a trickle of blood on his leg. He smashed the butt of the gun into the glass again and again. The cracks spread, and finally the window gave up the fight and shattered.
Once the gap was there, it was easy to enlarge it. The little man allowed the artificial gravity of the laboratory to pull him to the floor, resting his injured leg, while he chipped away at the lower edge of the hole until he had made a doorway in the wall.
He crawled through, into the world of his life-system. Once there, beyond the pull of gravity, his leg stopped hurting him, and his body was filled with an exhilarating buoyancy.
He breathed the air, and imagined that he found it cleaner and fresher, than the cold, sterile air of his own world inside Lamarck. He felt nothing, but he knew that in the air he breathed, and through the wound in his leg, the virus was invading his body.
He began to crawl away from the window, to get away from the murdered robot, and found that he could crawl with amazing rapidity and with little expenditure of effort. There was just enough gravity to stop him hurting himself. The engineer left the window behind, because it was not a window into a world that had sent an executioner to take away his life. He pulled himself further and further into the body of the silver forest, and on, and on.
He found another forest—another single being with many individual aspects. This was a conglomeration of tree-forms which consisted of twisted, many-branched stalks, each of which seemed to have arisen by a process of bifurcation and spiralling away of elements from a single point or origin. Each of the branches terminated in a small, eye-like spheroid.
The branches were of equal thickness, and of a glass-like smoothness and hardness. At first sight, the entire forest seemed petrified, but there was life there, and growth. Nothing petrified in the Lamarck life-system. Within the globes at the ends of the branches, the engineer could perceive movement, and when he stopped to look more closely, he saw a shifting and pouring like swirling smoke that could only be cytoplasmic streaming. He perceived darker regions that were nuclei and organelles. He concluded that the spheroids were the living elements of a colonial being or hive, which constructed the stalks which bore them from purely inorganic matter.
Then he pulled himself on, half-flying through the small forest, and into another forest, and another. He had lost sight of the smashed window, and he could not see the battery of solar cells which were the only other evidence of human interference with the Lamarck life-system. He was alone, a stranger in the world he had made. He floated to a stop, and sank slowly to the carpet of tiny unique organisms. He lay, exhausted, listening to the beating of his heart and admiring the wonders which his genetic engineering skill had produced.
He saw a giant plant, not far off, which must have covered a much larger area of ground than any of the so-called forests. It was of such complexity that it was built in tiers in the air.
The lowest layer consisted of a dense tangle of light-coloured tendrils of even continuity, not unlike the filaments of the silken forest. The slender threads were woven into a cushion of varying density.
Above this was a looser serial carpet of thicker elements which were darker in colour, but of a similar even texture. The threads stirred gently, and appeared to be very flexible.
From this aerial stratum there extended towers of small spherical elements, held vertical by some adhesive force that was not apparent. These spherical cells were being continually produced by budding from the filaments. The topmost spheres were always losing the mysterious adhesion and drifting away, falling very slowly, in a dipping-and-soaring fashion. Eventually, they exploded into clouds of invisibly small virus particles.
In the opposite direction, the engineer could see another vast growth, which had the appearance of a tree bearing fruits that were precious stones. The growth arose from a deep bed of slime—a great, extensive cushion which would have seemed hostile to life had it not been part of the Lamarck life-system. When he squinted, the little man could perceive thousands of rod-like bodies moving randomly within the slime-body.
The tree itself was slender and extremely beautiful in the manner of its curving and branching. The branches were translucent, but not wholly clear, for at certain points they contained encapsulated rod-bodies, entombed like flies in amber. The engineer imagined that the tree was formed of crystalline slime.
At the tip of each branch was a large spherical or elliptical jewel, each enclosed by a thin membrane. There was movement within each gem, and they looked like the many faceted eyes of some strange beast.
The engineer looked, and marvelled, and loved.
Asteroid Lamarck passed within the orbit of Mars.
The engineer slept, and while he slept he died.
The virus worked within him. It invaded cells, penetrated nuclei, It pre-empted protein production. It killed. And while it was still killing, it began rebuilding and regenerating. The second virus chromosome and the forty-six human chromosomes formed a complex, and the dna within them began to undergo chemical metamorphosis as bases shifted and genes were remodeled.
As the new genotype was created, the virus sculpted, stimulated and responded. It mutated and tested. The path of generation of the new being was amended continually.
In conjunction with the chemical metamorphosis came physical change. The body of the engineer began to flow and distort. A new being was born inside him and was growing from him, feeding on him. The virus tested the viability of what its second set of chromosomes was building, and the being that was emerging was perfectly designed to fulfill its task. The process which was going on inside the corpse of the little man was far beyond the elementary process which the engineer had made. The rapidity of the Lamarck life-system’s evolution had taken the speed, the smoothness, and the efficiency of the metamorphosis a long way.
The new being absorbed the engineer, and came slowly to maturity.
Asteroid Lamarck crossed the orbit of Earth.
The body of the little man had lost most of its substance. The face had widened into a skull-grin, and the ridiculous pair of spectacles lay lop-sided across the gleaming white bridge of the nose. The brain had completely gone from the skull, and the whole of the lower abdomen had disappeared. The legs were only thin ropes of decayed muscle. The ribs were reduced to tiny studs attached to what had once been the spine. Only dust remained where the internal organs had once been.
Above the corpse, a winged thing hovered bat-like, testing its strength. It was small bodied but large-skulled. It had a tiny, oddly human, wizened face without eyes. The face moved continuously as though expressing unknown emotions, and the creature made a small, thin sound like a rattling laugh.
It flew away from the remains of its father, zooming through the weird forests of inner Lamarck in great circles. Finally, it found the silver forest, and settled on a branch very near to the smashed glass wall. It lay still. It had never eaten. It was not even equipped to eat. It had been born only to perform one small task for the Lamarck life-system, and then to die again.
Meanwhile, the plants of inner Lamarck had passed through the doorway which the engineer had made for them. They had explored his laboratories, his library, his bedroom, his office. They had dipped under doors and through keyholes. There was only one place they could not reach, and that was the world of outer Lamarck, beyond the great iron air-lock that had neither crack nor key.
Plants died, and were reborn. New types of plant formed around and on the iron door—plants that built their cell walls out of pure iron. With vegatable efficiency, they began to dissolve the airlock.
The winged creature began to sprinkle tiny objects from its abdomen. A sphincter pulsed and pulsed hundreds of contractions per minute, and every pulse released another particle. The motes floated in the air, far too light for the weak gravity to pull them to the ground. The air in the silver forest became filled with them.
Asteroid Lamarck crossed the orbit of Venus.
Pin
pricks formed in the outer airlock door. The inner door was completely gone. Air began to seep away, but before the seepage became dramatic, the holes were the size of fists. Like all the other members of the Lamarck life-system, the iron-eaters were fast and efficient. The seepage became a rush. With it, the air took the tiny particles produced in hundreds of millions by the winged creature.
Lamarck was too small to hold the atmosphere which flooded out into the desolation of its outer surface. The air was lost and the particles with it. While Lamarck plunged on towards the sun, in an ever-decreasing spiral, it left behind a long, long trail of Arrhenius spores, which began to drift lazily on the solar wind.
Slowly outwards, toward the orbit of Earth.
THE END OF THE WHOLE MESS
STEPHEN KING
I WANT to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the messiah—an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you—if there are any of “you” later on to read this—will have to settle for the freeze-dried version. The direct injection works very fast. I figure I’ve got somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, depending on my blood type. I think it’s A, which should give me a little more time, but I’ll be goddamned if I can remember for sure. If it turns out to be O, you could be in for a lot of blank pages, my hypothetical friend. I think maybe I better assume the worst and go as fast as I can. I’m using the electric typewriter—Bobby’s word processor is faster but the genny’s cycle is too irregular to be trusted, even with the voltage regulator. I’ve only got one shot at this; I can’t risk getting most of the way home and then seeing the whole thing go to data heaven because of an ohm drop.
My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy was the messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with his own discovery four hours ago. He called it The Calmative. A Real Big Mistake might have been a better name, but what’s done is done and can’t be undone, as the Irish have been saying for centuries . . . which proves what assholes they are.