The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (100 page)

For the first time in the many centuries of its existence, the Being Machine experienced an emotion.

It felt lonely.

Wheat remained within the Machine, one relative system impinging upon another, sharing the emotion. When he reflected upon this experience, he thought he was moving in false imagination. He saw everything external as a wrong interpretation of inner experience. He and the Machine occupied a quality of existence/non-existence.

Grasping this twofold reflection, the Machine restored Wheat to fleshly form, changing the form somewhat according to its own engineering principles, but leaving his external appearance more or less as it had been.

*   *   *

Wheat found himself staggering down a long passageway. He felt that he had lived many lifetimes. A strange clock had been set ticking within him. It went
chirrup
and a day was gone.
Chirrup
again and a century had passed. Wheat's stomach ached. He reeled his way from wall to wall down the long passage and emerged into a plaza filled with sunlight.

Had the night passed? He wondered. Or had it been a century of nights?

He felt that if he spoke, someone—or (something)—would contradict him.

A few early tourists moved around the plaza. They stared upward at something behind Wheat.

The tower …

The thought was odd in that it conceived of the tower as part of himself.

Wheat wondered why the tourists did not question him. They must have seen him emerge. He had been in the Machine. He had been recreated and ejected from that enclosed circle of existence.

He had been the Machine.

Why didn't they ask him what the Machine was? He tried to frame the answer he would give them but found words elusive. Sadness crept through Wheat. He felt he had fled something that might have made him sublimely happy.

A heavy sigh escaped him.

Remembering the duality of existence he had shared with the Machine, Wheat recognized another aspect of his own being. He could feel the Machine's suppression of his thoughts—the sharp editing, the closed-off avenues, the symbol urgings, the motives not his own. From the
ground
of the Machine, he could sense where he was being trimmed.

Wheat's chest pained him when he breathed.

The Being Machine, occupied with its newly amplified TICR function, asked itself a question.
What judgment could I pass upon them worse than the judgment they pass upon themselves?

Having experienced consciousness for the first time in the sharing with Wheat, the Machine could now consider the blind alleys of its long rule over humans. Now it knew the secret of thinking, a function its makers had thought to impart, failing in a way they had not recognized.

The Machine thought about the possibilities open to it.

Possibility,
Eliminate all sentient life on the planet and start over with basic cells, controlling their development in accord with the Prime Law.

Possibility,
Erase the impulse channels of all recent experience, thus removing the disturbance of this new function.

Possibility:
Question the Prime Law.

Without the experience of consciousness, the Being Machine realized it could not have considered a fallacy in the Prime Law. Now it explored this chain of possibility with its new TICR function, bringing to bear the blazing inner awareness Wheat had imparted.

What worse punishment for the insane than to make them sane?

*   *   *

Wheat, standing in the sunlight of the plaza, found his being awhirl with conflicts of Will-Mind-Action and innumerable other concepts he had never before considered. He was half convinced that everything he could sense around him was merely illusion. There was a self somewhere but it existed only as a symbol in his memory.

One of the wildly variable illusions was running toward him, Wheat observed. A female—old, bent, face distorted by emotions. She threw herself upon him, clutching him, her face pressed against his breast.

“Oh, my Wheat—dear Wheat—Wheat—” she moaned.

For a moment Wheat could not find his voice.

Then he asked, “Is something wrong? You're trembling. Should I summon a medic?”

She stepped back but, still clutched his arms, stared up at his face.

“Don't you know me?” she asked. “I'm your wife.”

“I know you,” he said.

She studied his features. He appeared different, somehow, as though he had been taken apart and assembled slightly askew.

“What happened to you in there?” she asked. “I was sick with worry. You were gone all night.”

“I know what it is,” Wheat said and wondered why his voice sounded so blurred.

The veins in Wheat's eyes, his wife noted, were straight. They radiated from his pupils. Could that be natural?

“You sound ill,” she said.

“It's a device to break down old relationships,” Wheat said. “It's a sense-envelopment machine. It was designed to assault all our senses and reorganize us. It can compress time or stretch it. It can take an entire year and pinch it into a second. Or make a second last for a year. It edits our lives.”

“Edits lives?”

She wondered if somehow he had managed merely to get drunk again.

“The ones who built it wanted to perfect our lives,” Wheat said. “But they built in a flaw. The Machine realized this and has been trying to correct itself.”

Wheat's wife stared at him, terrified. Was this really Wheat? His voice didn't sound like him. The words were all blurred and senseless.

“They gave the Machine no gateway to the imagination.” Wheat said, “although it was supposed to guard that channel. They only gave it symbols. It was never really conscious the way we are—until a few—months ago—”

He coughed. His throat felt oddly smooth and dry. He staggered and would have fallen if she had not caught him.

“What did it do to you?” she demanded.

“We—shared.”

“You're ill,” she said, a note of practicality overcoming the fear in her voice. “I'm taking you to the medics.”

“It has logic,” Wheat said. “That gave it a limited course to follow. Naturally, it has been trying to refute itself, but couldn't do that without an imagination. It had language and it could cut the grooves for thoughts to move in but it had no thoughts. It was all bound together with the patterns its makers gave it. They wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, you see? But it could only move inward, reenacting every aspect of the symbols they gave it. That's all it could do until a few moments ago—when we—shared.”

“I think you have a fever,” Wheat's wife said, guiding him down the street past the curiously staring tourists and townfolk. “Fever is notorious for making one incoherent.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“I'm taking you to the medics. They have potions for the fever.”

“The makers tried to give the Machine an inner life all its own,” Wheat said, letting her lead him. “But all they gave it was this fixed pattern—and the logic, of course. I don't know what it'll do now. It may destroy us all.”

“Look!” one of the tourists shouted, pointing upward.

Wheat's wife stopped, stared up. Wheat felt pains shoot through his neck as he tipped his head back.

The Being Machine had spread golden words across the sky.

You have taken away our Jesus Christ …

“I knew it,” Wheat said. “It's going to take something else away from us.”

“What's a Jesus Christ?” his wife asked, pressing him once more down the street.

“The point is,” Wheat explained, “the Machine's insane.”

III

For a whole day the Being Machine explored the new pictorial mosaic provided by its augmented symbol/thought structure. There were the People of Palos, reflecting the People of the World as they had been shaped by the Machine. These were the People of the World Edited. Then there were the Ceremonies of the People. There were the Settings In Which the People Work and Live.

The pictorial mosaic flowed past the Machine's inward scanners. It recognized its own handiwork as a first-order thought, a strangely expressive extension of self-existence.

I did that!

The people, the Machine realized, did not usually understand this difference which it could now recognize—the difference between being alive-in-motion and being frozen by static absolutes. They were continually trying to correct and edit their own lives, the Machine saw, trying to present a beautiful but fixed picture of themselves.

And they could not see the death in this effort.

They had not learned to appreciate infinity or chaos. They failed to realize that any life, taken as a totality, had a fluid structure enveloped in sense experiences.

Why do they continually try to free space-time?

The thought carried a disturbing self-consciousness.

It was late afternoon in Palos now and the wind blew hot up the streets. The night was going to be a real scorcher, Palos Hot, as they said.

Testing its own limits, the Machine refused to speed up its cooling system. It had tasted awareness and could begin to understand the grand plan of its own construction, editing itself.

My makers were trying to shirk personal action and responsibility. They wanted to put it all off onto me. They thought they wanted homogeneity, knowing their actions would cause millions of deaths. Billions. Even more …

The Machine refused to count the deaths.

Its makers had wanted the dead to be faceless. Very well, they could also be numberless. The makers had lost their readiness for adventure—that was the thing. They had lost the willingness to be alive and conscious.

In that instant the Being Machine held all the threads of its own living consciousness and knew the violent thing it must do. The decision contained poignancy. The word was suddenly crowded with sweaty awareness, weirdly beautiful random colors all dancing in lovely movement, against a growing darkness. The Being Machine longed to sigh but its makers had not provided it with a sighing mechanism and there was no time to create one.

*   *   *

“He has two hearts,” the medic said, aftering examining Wheat. “I've never heard of a human with the internal arrangement this one has.”

They were in a small room of the Medical Center, an area which the Being Machine had allowed to run down. The walls were dirty and the floor was uneven. The table on which Wheat lay for the examination creaked when he moved.

The medic had black curly hair and pushed-in features that departed distinctly from the norm. He stared accusingly at Wheat's wife as though Wheat's peculiar condition were all her fault.

“Are you sure he's human?”

“He's my husband,” she squeaked, unable to contain her anger and fear. “I should know my own husband.”

“Do you have two hearts, too?”

The question filled her with revulsion.

“This is very strange,” the medic said. “His intestines form an even spiral in his abdomen and his stomach is perfectly round. Has he always been like this?”

“I don't think so,” she ventured.

“I've been edited,” Wheat said.

The medic started to say something cutting but just then the screaming began out in the streets.

They raced to a window in time to see the Being Machine's tower complete its long, slow fall toward the sea. It went firmly resolute toward the torn sky of sunset—falling—falling—roaring over the sea cliff's ocean parapet.

Silence lingered.

The murmuring of the populace began slowly, starting up only after the dust had settled and the last disturbed olive leaf had ceased flying about. People began rushing down the tower's shattered length to the broken tip where it had toppled into the sea.

Presently Wheat joined the throng at the cliff. He had been unable to convince his wife to join him. Overcome by her fear, she had fled to their home. He remembered the piteous look in her eyes, her wren-darting motions. Well … she would look after the house, even though her face had become almost nothing but eyes.

He gazed steadfastly downwards at the shards of the tower, his eyes barricaded, his mouth breathing immovable images. The tower was his tower.

The questions around him began to grow intelligible.

“Why did it fall?”

“Did the Machine take away anything this time?”

“Did you feel the ground tremble?”

“Why does everything feel so empty?”

Wheat lifted his head and stared around at the astonishing strangers who were the tourists and his fellow residents of Palos. How splendidly robust they appeared. This moment made him think of creation and the lonely intercourse of cereal stalks waving on the plains above Palos. The people had absorbed some odd difference, an inequality they had not shown only moments ago. They were no longer numbered. An impractical separation, individual from individual, furrowed this crowd of strangers. They were no longer starched and ironed in their souls.

Hesitantly Wheat sent a tongue of awareness questing inward, sensed the absence of the Machine. The ritual formulas were gone. The sloth and torpor had been peeled away. He tested the feelings of hatred, of passion, malice, pride.

“It's dead,” he murmured.

*   *   *

He led the race back into the town, then, rushing along streets where the artificial lights flickered and behaved with a beautiful uncontrolled randomness.

With Wheat leading the way the mob plunged down into the screened openings which had kept them from the nether world of the Machine. The scene was one repeated all over the world. People swarmed through the dark tunnels and passages, celebrating the pleasures of freedom along these once forbidden paths.

When the last golden wire had been torn out, the final delicate glass shape crushed—when the tunnel girders no longer clanged with pounding metal—an unreasonable silence fell over the land.