Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (5 page)

Ployploy now stood at the back of the house. The wind that rustled her long dress blew leaves against her. It sighed around the weird and desolate garden like fate at a christening, ruining the last of the roses. Later, the tumbling pattern of petals might be sucked from paths, lawn and patio by the steel gardener; now, they made a tiny tide about her feet.

Extravagant architecture overshadowed Ployploy. Here a rococo fancy had mingled with a genius for fantastic portal and roof. Balustrades rose and fell, stairs marched through circular arches, grey and azure eaves swept almost to the ground. But all was sadly neglected. Virginia creeper, already hinting at its glory to come, strove to pull down the marble statuary; troughs of rose petals clogged every sweeping staircase. And all this formed the ideal background for the forlorn figure of Ployploy.

Except for her delicate pink lips, her face was utterly pale. Her hair was black; it hung straight, secured only once at the back of her head, and then fell in a tail to her waist. She looked mad indeed, her melancholy eyes peering toward the great elms as if they would scorch down everything in their line of vision. Smithlao turned to see what she stared at so compellingly.

The wild man he had observed from the air was just breaking through the thickets around the elm boles.

A sudden rain shower came down, rattling among the dry leaves of the shrubbery. It was over in a flash; during the momentary downpour, Ployploy never shifted her position, the wild man never looked up. Then the sun burst through, cascading a pattern of elm shadow over the house, and every flower wore a jewel of rain.

Smithlao reflected on what he had thought in Gunpat’s room about the coming end of man. Now he considered that it would be so easy for Nature, when parasite man was extinct, to begin again.

He waited tensely, knowing a fragment of drama was about to take place before his eyes. Across the sparkling lawn, a tiny tracked thing scuttled, pogoing itself up steps and out of sight through an arch. It was a perimeter guard, off to give the alarm, to warn that an intruder was about.

In a minute it returned. Four big robots accompanied it; one of them Smithlao recognized as the toadlike machine that had challenged his arrival. They threaded their way purposefully among the rosebushes, five differently shaped menaces. The metal gardener muttered to itself, abandoned its clipping, and joined the procession toward the wild man.

“He hasn’t a dog’s chance,” Smithlao said to himself. The phrase held significance; dogs, having been declared redundant, had long since been exterminated.

By now the wild man had broken through the barrier of the thicket and come to the lawn’s edge. He pulled a leafy branchlet off a shrub and stuck it into his shirt so that it partially obscured his face; he tucked another branch into his trousers. As the robots drew nearer, he raised his arms above his head, a third branch clasped in his hands.

The six machines encircled him, humming and chugging quietly.

The toad robot clicked, as if deciding on what it should do next.

“Identity?” it demanded.

“I am a rose tree,” the wild man said.

“Rose trees bear roses. You do not bear roses. You are not a rose tree,” the steel toad said. Its biggest, highest gun came level with the wild man’s chest.

“My roses are dead already,” the wild man said, “but I have leaves still. Ask the gardener if you do not know what leaves are.”

“This thing is a thing with leaves,” the gardener said at once in a deep voice.

“I know what leaves are. I have no need to ask the gardener. Leaves are the foliage of trees and plants which give them their green appearance,” the toad said.

“This thing is a thing with leaves,” the gardener repeated, adding, to clarify the matter, “the leaves give it a green appearance.”

“I know what things with leaves are,” said the toad. “I have no need to ask you, gardener.”

It looked as if an interesting, if limited, argument would break out between the two robots, but at this moment one of the other machines said something.

“This rose tree can speak,” it declared.

“Rose trees cannot speak,” the toad said at once. Having produced this pearl, it was silent, probably mulling over the strangeness of life. Then it said, slowly, “Therefore either this rose tree is not a rose tree or this rose tree did not speak.”

“This thing is a thing with leaves,” began the gardener doggedly. “But it is not a rose tree. Rose trees have stipules. This thing has no stipules. It is a breaking buckthorn. The breaking buckthorn is also known as the berry-bearing alder.”

This specialized knowledge extended beyond the vocabulary of the toad. A strained silence ensued.

“I am a breaking buckthorn,” the wild man said, still holding his pose. “I cannot speak.”

At this, all the machines began to talk at once, lumbering around him for better sightings as they did so, and barging into each other in the process. Finally, the toad’s voice broke above the metallic babble.

“Whatever this thing with leaves is, we must uproot it. We must kill it,” it said.

“You may not uproot it. That is a job only for gardeners,” the gardener said. Setting its shears rotating, telescoping out a mighty scythe, it charged at the toad.

Its crude weapons were ineffectual against the toad’s armour. The latter, however, realized that they had reached a deadlock in their investigation.

“We will retire to ask Charles Gunpat what we shall do,” it said. “Come this way.”

“Charles Gunpat is in conference,” the scout robot said. “Charles Gunpat must not be disturbed in conference. Therefore we must not disturb Charles Gunpat.”

“Therefore we must wait for Charles Gunpat,” said the metal toad imperturbably. He led the way close by where Smithlao stood; they all climbed the steps and disappeared into the house.

Smithlao could only marvel at the wild man’s coolness. It was a miracle he still survived. Had he attempted to run, he would have been killed instantly; that was a situation the robots had been taught to cope with. Nor would his double talk, inspired as it was, have saved him had he been faced with only one robot, for the robot is a single-minded creature.

In company, however, they suffer from a trouble which sometimes afflicts human gatherings: a tendency to show off their logic at the expense of the object of the meeting.

Logic! That was the trouble. It was all robots had to go by. Man had logic and intelligence; he got along better than his robots. Nevertheless, he was losing the battle against Nature. And Nature, like the robots, used only logic. It was a paradox against which man could not prevail.

As soon as the file of machines had disappeared into the house, the wild man ran across the lawn and climbed the first flight of steps, working toward the motionless girl. Smithlao slid behind a beech tree to be nearer to them; he felt like an evildoer, watching them without an interposed screen, but could not tear himself away; he sensed that here was a little charade which marked the end of all that man had been. The wild man was approaching Ployploy now, moving slowly across the terrace as if hypnotized.

She spoke first.

“You were resourceful,” she said to him. Her white face carried pink in its cheeks now.

“I have been resourceful for a whole year to get to you,” he said. Now that his resources had brought him face to face with her, they failed, and left him standing helplessly. He was a thin young man, thin and sinewy, his clothes worn, his beard unkempt. His eyes never left Ployploy’s.

“How did you find me?” Ployploy asked. Her voice, unlike the wild man’s, barely reached Smithlao. A haunting look, as fitful as the autumn, played on her face.

“It was a sort of instinct — as if I heard you calling,” the wild man said. “Everything that could possibly be wrong with the world is wrong. Perhaps you are the only woman in the world who loves; perhaps I am the only man who could answer. So I came. It was natural; I could not help myself.”

“I always dreamed someone would come,” she said. “And for weeks I have felt —
known
— you were coming. Oh, my darling...”

“We must be quick, my sweet,” he said. “I once worked with robots — perhaps you could see I know them. When we get away from here, I have a robot plane that will take us away — anywhere; an island, perhaps, where things are not so desperate. But we must go before your father’s machines return.”

He took a step toward Ployploy.

She held up her hand.

“Wait!” she implored him. “It’s not so simple. You must know something... The — the Mating Centre refused me the right to breed. You ought not to touch me.”

“I hate the Mating Centre!” the wild man said. “I hate everything to do with the ruling regime. Nothing they have done can affect us now.”

Ployploy clenched her hands behind her back. The faint colour had left her cheeks. A fresh shower of dead rose petals blew against her dress, mocking her.

“It’s so hopeless,” she said. “You don’t understand...”

His wildness was humbled now.

“I threw up everything to come to you,” he said. “I only desire to take you into my arms.”

“Is that all, really all, all you want in the world?” she asked.

“I swear it,” he said simply.

“Then come and touch me,” Ployploy said.

At that moment Smithlao saw a tear glint in her eye, bright and ripe as a raindrop.

The hand the wild man extended to her was lifted to her cheek. She stood unflinching on the grey terrace, her head high. And so his loving fingers gently brushed her countenance. The explosion was almost instantaneous.

Almost. It took the traitorous nerves in Ployploy’s epidermis but a fraction of a second to analyse the touch as belonging to another human being and to convey their findings to the nerve centre; there, the neurological block implanted by the Mating Centre in all mating rejects, to guard against just such a contingency, went into action at once. Every cell in Ployploy’s body yielded up its energy in one consuming gasp. It was so intense that the wild man was also killed by the detonation.

Just for a second, a new wind lived among the winds of Earth.

Yes, thought Smithlao, turning away, you had to admit it was neat. And, again, logical. In a world on the brink of starvation, how else stop undesirables from breeding? Logic against logic, man’s pitted against Nature’s — that was what caused all the tears of the world.

He made off through the dripping plantation, heading back for the vane, anxious to be away before Gunpat’s robots reappeared. The shattered figures on the terrace were still, already half-covered with leaves and petals. The wind roared like a great triumphant sea in the treetops. It was hardly odd that the wild man did not know about the neurological trigger; few people did, barring psychodynamicians and the Mating Council — and, of course, the rejects themselves. Yes, Ployploy had known what would happen. She had chosen deliberately to die like that.

“Always said she was mad!” Smithlao told himself. He chuckled as he climbed into his machine, shaking his head over her lunacy.

It would be a wonderful point with which to rile Charles Gunpat the next time he needed a hate-brace.

The Robot Millennia

When Time brought the inevitable collapse, only a minority realized it. In any period, the number of men and women aware of the nature of their own age is few. The cynicism of Smithlao was rooted in ignorance.

Men of perception exist in the blindest epochs, just as true nobility flourishes in epochs that we label cruel; but the men of perception now found themselves confronted by a situation they were powerless to alter. When the structure of their culture disintegrated, that perceptive few headed outward to the solar system and beyond; their descendants would not be heard of on Earth again until twice twenty million years had elapsed.

They left in the last of the old spaceships — “the only good machine,” as a wise man has it, “because it breeds an escape from the machine.”

(And those escapees from the Sterile Millennia — they were the spores blown by the winds of war that established man in every cell of the honeycomb galaxy. Although unaware of the greater purpose that worked through them, they bore that curious malady known as civilization, in which systems and aspirations supplant the blind dreams of the savage.)

This is the way Time has of fulfilling itself: while the depths of adversity are being reached, the foundation stones of future greatness are laid.

So the summers and winters wore on, anonymously. For the handful of people then alive, tended as they were by every variety of robot, it
may
even have seemed enviable, a good time. But the handful grew less, generation by generation, and the savages were coming, and the machines continued at their own purposes on the barren land...

The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a two-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by overcropping or the long-lasting effects of nuclear bombardment. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.