In the Deadlands (7 page)

“I don't know, Deet. I'm just following you. Wherever you want, Deet.”

“Hey, don't be a bummer—this is...
something
.”

Blue and white streaks, flat mottled brown patches, familiar shapes, but white streaks kept them from being too familiar and—

FLASH!

Now! I was starting to see the inside of it. It was like a whiteness, but with crystal blues and spidery blacks and all kinds of coldnesses creeping out from inside. An expanding—and a shrinking too.

“Deet! Please, slow down a bit. You're going too fast for me.”

“No, I'm not. It's okay.”

A greater darkness beyond, everything was scattered and speckled tiny this side of it. I wanted to expand to fill it. A glaring whiteness off to one side shouldn't have been that big. After all, it was really only very tiny and—

Hang on, Deet—here we go!

FLASH!

The glaring whiteness dwindled to be a speck like all the others. I marked it for future reference. In case we wanted to come back to it later.

A wash of bright stretched from one infinity to the other. All the yesterdays stacked against all the tomorrows. The thing had a structure, but I was too close to it to see what it was. I'd have to move back—and the greater darkness backdrop was still just as far away and—

“Deet! Can't we stop and rest for just a minute?”

“Oh, no, kitten! Come on, we're almost there! This is it! This is really it!”

And—

FLASH!

I grabbed her hand and we went. Yeah, this
was
it! I didn't have to say it any more. It wasn't necessary. I was convinced—because it really
was
it.
IT! The
trip—and it was still going!

A great wheel of spiraling sparkling dust turning against the ultimate velvet. Turning, turning. Oh wow, how big is that thing? How big?

FLASH!

Tiny—really very tiny. A myriad of them spin twinkly through the darkness. Like snowflakes, scattering in a wind, roiling ever outward. We dive back into and out of it. I want to keep going. Expand to fill the whole—

FLASH!

—little fireflies disappear into the hole. And—

FLASH!

FLASH!

FLASH!

And I still hadn't filled it.

FLASH!

But I was getting there! I was!

FLASH!

Oh, Woozle? Isn't this the greatest—

FLASH!

Almost, almost. Just once more, I think—and then we'll fill this tiny black cubicle, and then one more after that and we'll burst it and look down onto it from the outside and look down at all the row upon row of identical shiny black globes and—

FLASH!

Not yet!

FLASH!

Still not yet! Dammit! Once more. I want it, dammit! Let's go, Woozle. Once more.

FLASH!

And I throw my hands outstretched into the nevermore, always reaching and grasping, that elusive black wall remaining just ever so out of my reach and—

FLASH!

FLASH!

FLASH! DAMMIT!

Blackness, nothing but blackness and blackness beyond. Almost, almost. I almost made it, this time I almost made it...

FIASH!

But nothing.

Okay, so we don't do the big number this time around. We dive back into the wrong end of the microscope and shrink down into the other direction of infinity—inwardly.

Ping.

The little wheels reappear, spinning madly. I pick one at random and down we go, and—

Ping.

—it becomes a big wheel. I head for a spiral arm, zigzag around the exploding core, and—

Ping.

—pop out at a
here
in the middle of empty brightness. Rocky nothingnesses whirl about it. The wrong one. Not mine. Try again. So—

Ping.

And this time,
here
is a blue and red binary, a pinpoint of bright and a bloated crimson vagueness. Streamers of blood-colored gas spiral outward from the giant. The lesser-sized one would have been lost among them if not for its brilliance. But— This one isn't mine either.

Ping.

Up and out again. An explosion, a never-ending one. Dazzling, sleeting, brighting, sheeting, flaring, flashing, glaring, shimmering, slashing intensity of light so thick you have to push at it to move. All around me. All around. We hung at the core of the supernova and—

FLASHED.

The wheel again, the great wheel. No, that's the wrong direction. I wanted to go the other way. My God, how big is that thing anyway? Immense. No, tiny—tiny, tiny, remember! I am immense. Remember the outer blackness, how big it is and how big I am and never fill it. That wheel is only a mote of dust in the hungry sucking dark. I am as big to the wheel as it is to me. I am small and vast and—

Ping.

I remember and dive back into it. Back to the home world, right, Woozle?

Woozle?

Hey, Woozle—where are you?

Woozle...?

I'm alone in the vampire dark. Somewhere I've lost my—

“Woozle!!”

No answer.

I plunge through the night, carefully retracing. Where did I leave her? Where did I let go? She was with me here. Flash. Here. Flash. Here.

She was with me all the way. Or was she? She wasn't. She wasn't with me at all.

Flash/Ping.

Back down into the wheel. Back down. Home system, home sun, home planet. Yeah, that's it. Blue-white streaked disc. Dive into it.

I know what must have happened. She couldn't keep up. Yeah, that's right. She couldn't keep up. So she went home without me. She went on home. Yeah, that's what she must have done. Yeah, that's it. She wouldn't just run off on her own.

Into the disc and down the long tunnel and the walls unstretch, become a room again, and I land on the floor and down.

The room is empty. And alone.

All of them were empty—

AFTERWORD:

Other people open doorways that take them away from us. Sometimes we can follow those journeys, sometimes we can't. Sometimes we want to and don't.

I sometimes wonder where they went and if I should have followed….

Oracle for a White Rabbit

HARLIE and I have been friends for a long time. He insists on creeping into books that are not supposed to be about him and making them about him anyway. In every case, he's been a damned pain in the ass—because he keeps asking uncomfortable questions. HARLIE's job is to create ethical dilemmas.

This story is his beginning.

It was the sixties. Some writers were arguing that the use of drugs enhanced their creativity. Others disagreed, arguing that tampering with your brain chemistry was probably not a good idea.

Myself, I was something of an agnostic on the issue. (Yes, I did try marijuana in college, but I didn't exhale.) But it didn't take me long to discover that the use of marijuana was slowing down my typing speed from 120 words per minute to no words per month.

At this remove, decades later, I'm clear that drug use is a self-centered activity. It's about what's happening in your own head, not what's happening in the physical universe. It doesn't make a difference in the real world. It doesn't contribute anything to anybody else. If anything, it degrades a person's ability to make a difference.

But I didn't know it that way then and I couldn't say it as clearly as I can now. What I did know, if only on a gut level, was that there was something wrong with the arguments for drug use—and if I couldn't ask the right question, then maybe HARLIE could.

So the first HARLIE story wasn't really about HARLIE. It was about asking a question that ultimately turned out to be much more profound than I realized when I typed it.

It's at the end of the story.

WHAT WILL I BE WHEN I GROW UP?

YOU ARE ALREADY GROWN UP.

YOU MEAN THIS IS AS UP AS I WILL GET?

PHYSICALLY, YES. YOU HAVE REACHED THE PEAK OF YOUR PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT.

OH.

HOWEVER, THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF GROWING UP YOU MUST DO. FROM NOW ON, YOU MUST DEVELOP MENTALLY.

HOW CAN I DO THAT?

THE SAME AS ANYBODY ELSE. BY STUDYING AND LEARNING AND THINKING.

WHEN I FINISH, THEN WILL I BE ALL GROWN UP?

YES.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

I DON'T KNOW. PROBABLY A VERY LONG TIME.

HOW LONG IS A LONG TIME?

IT DEPENDS ON HOW HARD YOU WORK.

I WILL WORK VERY HARD. I WILL LEARN EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW AND I WILL FINISH AS SOON AS I CAN BECAUSE I WANT TO BE GROWN UP.

THAT IS AN ADMIRABLE AMBITION, BUT I DON'T THINK YOU WILL EVER BE ABLE TO FINISH.

WHY? DON'T YOU THINK THAT I AM SMART ENOUGH?

YOU MISUNDERSTAND ME. I THINK THAT YOU ARE SMART ENOUGH. IT'S JUST THAT THERE IS SO MUCH TO KNOW, NO ONE PERSON COULD EVER KNOW IT ALL.

I COULD TRY.

YES, BUT SCIENTISTS KEEP DISCOVERING MORE AND MORE THINGS ALL THE TIME. YOU WOULD NEVER CATCH UP.

BUT THEN IF I CAN'T KNOW EVERYTHING THEN I CAN NEVER BE GROWN UP.

NO. IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE GROWN UP AND NOT KNOW EVERYTHING.

IT IS?

I DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING AND I'M GROWN UP.

YOU ARE?

Auberson thought about going for water but decided that was too much trouble. Instead, he popped the pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry.

“Don't you take any water with them?” asked Hanley, staring as he came into the office.

“Why bother? Either you can take 'em or you can't. Want one?”

Hanley shook his head. “Not now. I'm on something else.”

“Uppers or downers?”

“Right now, a bummer.”

“Oh?” Auberson dropped the plastic pill tube back into his desk drawer and slid it shut. “What's up?”

“That damned computer again.” Hanley dropped himself into a chair, his long legs sprawling out.

“You mean HARLIE?”

“Who else? You know another computer with delusions of grandeur?”

“What's he up to now?”

“Same thing. But worse than ever.”

Auberson nodded. “I figured it would happen again. You want me to take a look?”

“That's what you're getting paid for. You're the psychologist.”

“I'm also the project chief.” Auberson sighed. “All right.” He lifted himself out of the chair and grabbed his coat from the back of the door. “HARLIE, I think, is getting to be more trouble than he's worth.” They began the long familiar walk to the computer control center.

Hanley grinned as he matched strides. “You're just annoyed because every time you think you've figured out what makes him tick, he makes a liar out of you.”

Auberson snorted. “Robot psychology is still an infant science. How does anyone know what a computer is thinking—especially one that's convinced it can think like a human being?” They paused at the elevator. “What're you doing about dinner? I have a feeling this is going to be another all-nighter.”

“Nothing yet. Want to send out for something?”

“Yeah, that's probably what we'll end up doing.” Auberson pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket “Want one?”

“What are they, Acapulco Golds?”

“Highmasters.”

“Good enough.” Hanley helped himself to one of the marijuana cylinders and puffed it into flame. “Frankly, I never thought that Highmasters were as strong as they could be.”

“It's all in your head.” Auberson inhaled deeply.

“It's a matter of taste,” corrected Hanley.

“If you don't like it, don't smoke it.”

Hanley shrugged. “It was free.”

The elevator arrived then and they stepped into it. As they dropped the fourteen stories to the computer level, Auberson thought he could feel it beginning to take effect. That and the pills. He took another drag, a long one.

The elevator discharged them in a climate-conditioned anteroom. Beyond the sealed doors they could hear the muffled clatter of typers. A sign on the wall facing them said:

HUMAN ANALOGUE ROBOT

LIFE INPUT EQUIVALENTS

PUT OUT ALL CIGARETTES

BEFORE ENTERING.

THIS MEANS YOU!

Damn! I always forget.

Carefully, Auberson stubbed out the Highmaster in a standing ash tray provided for just that purpose, then put the butt back into his silver case. No sense wasting it.

Inside, he seated himself at Console One without giving so much as a glance to the rows and rows of gleaming memory banks.

NOW THEN, HARLIE, he typed. WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?

HARLIE typed back:

CIRCLES ARE FULL AND COME BACK TO THE START

ALWAYS AND FOREVER NEVER ENDING,

THE DAY THE DARK TURNED INTO LIGHT

AND RAYS OF LIFE TURNED CORNERS WITHOUT BENDING,

Auberson ripped the sheet out of the typer and read it thoughtfully. He wished for his cigarette—the aftertaste of it was still on his tongue.

“This kind of stuff all afternoon?” he asked.

Hanley nodded. “Uh-huh. Only that's kind of mild compared to some of it. He must be coming down.”

“Another trip, eh?”

“Don't know what else you could call it.”

SNAP OUT OF IT, HARLIE, Auberson typed.

HARLIE answered:

WHEN SILENT THOUGHTS OF TINY STREAMS WORKING LIKE THE WORDLESS DREAMS NOW DISMANTLE PIECE BY PIECE THE MOUNTAINS OF MY MIND,

“Well, so much for that,” Auberson said.

“You didn't really expect it to work again, did you?”

“No, but it was worth a try.” Auberson pressed the
clear
button, switched the typer off. “What kind of inputs have you been giving him?”

“The standard stuff mostly—today's papers, a couple magazines—nothing out of the ordinary. A couple history texts, some live TV—oh, and
Time
magazine.”

“Nothing there to send him off like this. Unless—what subject were you stressing today?”

“Art appreciation.”

“It figures,” said Auberson. “Whenever we start getting to the really human inputs, he slips out again. Okay, let's try to bring him down. Give him some statistics—Wall Street, Dow Jones, Standard and Poor—anything else you can think of, anything you've got that uses a lot of equations. He can't resist an equals sign. Try some of that social engineering stuff—but numbers only, no words. Cut off his video too. Give him nothing to think about.”