Gray Matters (10 page)

There is seldom need for talk; the three travel in harmony, neither giving commands nor asking questions. The group has no leader. Skiri is the route finder because that is his calling. Diversions, like investigating the alien Sentinel, are the result of unanimous accord. There is no goal to a Quest and no reason for hurry. Curiosity can be leisurely indulged, for nothing occurs on earth that is not of interest to humanity.

Vera is marooned in memory, a castaway on an island that doesn’t exist. She spends long hours gazing out at the deep blue beyond the turquoise of the bay. On rare days she sees the tops of sails, but the distant ships come no closer. In the early mornings, she takes Chi-Chi for long rides down the beach and into the back country, over trails shaded by tamarind and mahogany trees. Together, they explore every part of the island.

There are five small towns, clusters of pastel houses with glinting tin rooftops. From a distance Vera never fails to see the streets crowded with people or hear the hub-bub of everyday life; but, when she rides nearer, the figures recede like a mirage and all noise fades into silence as she passes through the deserted village.

Once she stops and enters a two-story limestone house, intrigued by the sound of a child singing. Every room is filled with objects from her past; her childhood toys litter the floor; her mother’s needlepoint decorates the mildewed wall; rows of her father’s leather-bound medical books crowd the tables and shelves. She recognizes the voice of the child as her own, singing a song her grandmother taught her. But as she searches from room to room the singer seems to elude her, the haunting sound is always just around the corner or behind the next closed door.

A work team muddies the mountain stream. The twin Mark VIIs, alerted by a dislodged stone, focus their scanners on the three Nords, graceful as deer on the steep face of the gorge. Neither of the machines has ever seen a human before. They are familiar with the form, dormant, naked, and ranked in the Suspended Animation Facilities as neatly and efficiently as residents on file in the Depository. This is a concept of humanity the maintenance vans are able to comprehend. The sight of these three lithe creatures is something new.

In the hatcheries, all human fetus forms look alike. The adults, too, in the facilities, are all identical. Except for those slight differences of sex and class, the features of one human life-form provide an accurate mirror for all the rest. The Mark VII’s programming and memory units are completely unprepared for the scanner close-up of the three Nords approaching from across the stream. Their features are similar—white-blond hair and star-sapphire eyes—yet each one seems distinct and individual. The garments they wear have the same puzzling quality. At first scan they appear identical: brightly woven tunics and leggings decorated with geometric beadwork and tassles of iridescent feathers. But a memory print comparison instantly disproves this. The Nords are as exotically unalike as three snowflakes.

“What has happened here?” the first Nord asks, stepping from rock to rock across the stream.

The machine answers without hesitation. The circuits of the Amco-pak series retain the ancient notion that humans are to be obeyed. Taking turns, but with voices so identically monotonous that the narrative maintains a uniform flow, the Mark VIIs describe the rampaging of the runaway van and the terrific destruction done to the Surface Installation. The Nords listen intently, leaning on their staves at the edge of the stream. But the story is confusing, for the machines know only what information is contained in their instructions. They do not know the identity of the “captive” resident or how he happened to be “trapped” aboard the Mark X. All machines are on Emergency Alert as a result of the attack on the Surface Installation, but whether there is any connection between that event and their own assignment is a question that can’t be answered by the maintenance vans.

“Our main problem is the decantation procedure,” the lefthand Mark VII concludes. “Any hookup is impossible while the Mark X is upside down. And the van is already so damaged that righting it might endanger the resident. It is a delicate situation.”

Gregor eases his woven split-willow packbasket to the ground. He unlaces the buffalo-hide cover and reaches inside for his instrument case. “Let me see what I can do.”

He climbs between the treads of the up-turned Amco-pak, tapping the floor plate with his knuckle. Kneeling, he opens the flap of his instrument case, an oblong leather wallet embroidered with a pattern of dyed porcupine quills. It unfolds like a map to reveal a gleaming row of precision microtools. Within minutes, Gregor removes a circular portion of floor plate and probes into the tangle of connections and circuits. The Mark VIIs watch, immobile, as he finishes his work, making the final adjustments inside the Amco-pak by touch alone, reaching in with both hands to haul the cranial container into the open air like a newborn babe.

“More than thirty hours of breathable atmosphere left in here,” Gregor says, checking the weight of the reserve oxygen tank. “No need for a cockpit. We’ll make a litter while the vans take care of the wreck.”

Skiri and Swann set to work with their long knives, cutting and trimming a pair of saplings. Soon a litter is arranged, with the cranial container and two packbaskets lashed fast between the poles by several lengths of rawhide thong. Using cranes and winches, the Mark VIIs at last succeed in righting the Amco-pak. With the mangled machine in tow, the vans lumber awkwardly after the three Nords, already out of sight downstream, carrying the resident between them like hunters returning with their kill.

Inside the swaying cranial container, Obu Itubi’s mind fights for sanity. His serenity and the placid underwater view both ended with the simultaneous shutdown of all his other sensory controls. The memory unit, the auditory system and navigation center, the chorus of comforting displays and gauges, all vanished in the same terrifying instant. Darkness and silence enclose him like endless space. Itubi combats his fear with reason. Only two possibilities exist: either the Amco-pak suffered a sudden, unexplainably massive breakdown, or else the breakdown is his own and he is dead.

If this is death, Itubi is in hell. His isolation is complete and the hallucinations and
bardo
visions begin at once, his conscious mind continuing its logical and reassuring dialogue in spite of the waves of insanity rising out of the dark ocean of his subconsciousness. Beckoning lights and luminescent cogwheels whirl in the darkness. A panoply of lesser demons writhe and grimace. The terrible faces of his accusers are encrusted with precious jewels, the cold ruby eyes aflame with cruelty. Moment by moment, the calm island of his logic is submerging, the wild visionary tide rises and Itubi knows he is lost, the forces too strong. Soon he will be one with his madness.

After her first visit, Vera stays away from the house for a week, suspicious and afraid. Of what, she isn’t sure. A trap perhaps, with all those inviting memories for its bait. But curiosity is too strong, her afternoon rides seem to lead always to the house and soon Chi-Chi knows the way even when she drops the reins.

One afternoon she stays past sunset, looking through a box full of snapshots, and it is dark by the time she rises to leave. Vera spends the night on the couch downstairs, sleeping only fitfully as the old house creaks and sighs and numbers of bats slide with a silken flutter from under the tin roof. The coming of daylight calms her; she falls asleep at dawn, waking only when the noon heat turns the shuttered room into an oven.

That same afternoon she rides to the beach shelter and stuffs a pillowcase with her clothes and cosmetics. Yesterday seems years in the past. She finds it hard to believe that she’d ever lived in such a cramped bamboo hovel. Even a restless night on the couch is more comfortable than sleeping on a damp sandy floor. No, this isn’t Vera’s style; she can’t have been happy here. The idea is preposterous, as is the notion that she ever loved someone with the absurd name of Skeets. It was all a joke.

Vera leaves the shelter laughing, the pillowcase bundled in her arms. She mounts Chi-Chi and rides off between the sea-grape trees, never once looking back.

The air is acrid and hazy inside the domed Surface Installation. Squads of maintenance vans bulldoze the debris into smoldering mounds. A Mark V cuts a mangled I-beam into scrap. Gregor asks the machine who is in charge. Pointing the brilliant torch, the van directs them to a Unistat Administrator Exec Series: eight stationary oblong computers, interconnected slabs of steel and glass, arranged like a precision-made Stonehenge in an approximate circle around the ruined turntable.

Swann leaves the men and climbs over the rubble obstructing the smoking entrance of the hatchery. Gregor and Skiri watch until she is gone from sight before approaching the Unistat Administrator, carrying the litter in their hands, like sedan-chair porters. They are greeted by the first of the towering consoles and quickly instructed to proceed in a clockwise direction to Unit Five, where the Sentinel’s broadcast is being monitored. Console Unit Five starts speaking before either man has a chance to say a word. An obviously prerecorded speech: torrents of rhetoric praising the men, followed by the mundane unreeling of facts and details patiently recorded. The men set the litter on the floor and hunker down, only half listening as they trace idle patterns on the dust-covered plastic.

Swann returns moments after the Mark VIIs come lumbering in with the wreck in tow. “It was terrible,” she says. “Rooms full of bodies, torn, bleeding, most of them dismembered. Like a battlefield… . And the vans were cleaning up, shoveling the bodies like garbage. I made them stop. They’re transporting all human remains to the edge of the clearing for cremation.”

“Grim news here as well,” Skiri says, rising to his feet. “All communication channels to Center Control are dead. Only canned information is available from the Unistat Administrator. This unit has been instructed to isolate the cerebromorph immediately, using the quarantine procedure for handling contaminated material. Our resident stands condemmed of serious crimes.”

Gregor has his instrument case in his hands. “Let’s hear him out,” he says. “We listened long enough to the machine. I’ll disconnect the communicator from the wreck.”

The work takes only a few minutes, for the communicator is not an integral part of the Amco-pak’s mechanical system and is easily removed. Gregor immediately begins attaching the insulated neurofibril wire to hookups on the cranial container, expertly making a hundred difficult connections in a third of the time a maintenance van takes for the same job. “Last one… .” He tweezers the final cable into place with his microgrip wrench. A thin squeal issues from concealed speakers.

“A little more volume, Gregor?” Swann asks.

He adjusts the exterior control and the tiny piercing sound builds into a scream so agonized and unvarying, so explicitly the voice of utter terror and desolation, that it seems to echo from the very chambers of hell itself. The removal of deposit-drawer number A-0001-M(637-05-99) occasions very little real sorrow in the subdistrict. Every twentieth-century resident (more than seven-tenths of Level I) knows the story of Skeets Kalbfleischer, but they feel no loss at his passing. He is only a casualty, overlooked in the excitement, a bit-player in the drama of the recent emergency. Those who were not underground in Depositories during the Thirty-minute War remember the brotherhood of survival. A similar emotion unites the subdistrict; everyone together, enduring the same hardships, at the mercy of a single peril. To the residents who’d lived through the war, the news of the destruction of the world’s first cerebromorph seems as trivial as the wartime report that a stray Israeli missile leveled the pyramid of Cheops.

One twentieth-century native is concerned by the accident. The loss of Skeets Kalbfleischer’s brain is a problem for Auditor Philip Quarrels. No resident of Level I has ever been Elevated and Center Control had hoped Skeets would be the first. A big job. The onus is with the Auditor in charge. Success brings its own reward. Failure is unthinkable.

Although Quarrels is aware that this emergency period is bound to complicate matters, he nevertheless files a requisition with the Medical Authority for a mature adult brain. If none is available, perhaps the hatchery can be asked to grow one on special order.

Skeets Kalbfleischer is only organically dead. His brain has been destroyed, but his memory lingers on. His every thought and experience, even the unknown depths of his subconscious, are recorded on micro-encephalogram files. His dreams are preserved on old auditing reports. Spiritually, Skeets Kalbfleischer is very much alive; he is on file. When a new brain is available, Philip Quarrels will supervise the playback procedures. He doesn’t mind if he has to wait. He’s got all the time in the world.

In a distant sector on Level II, another Auditor confronts his problems. No direct communication channels have opened up to the Surface Installation and the Sentinel’s signal must be monitored by the Unistat Administrator. Then a file is delivered to the Dispatch Division and rebroadcast. There is a frustrating ten-minute time lapse; Obu Itubi’s Auditor is able to watch only the past. Any command takes another ten minutes to reach the Sentinel. He is powerless. But the Auditor knows his impotence is temporary. His quarry has only a twenty-minute lead.

Still, the behavior of the Nords is so erratic, so utterly haphazard, that the Auditor is forced to acknowledge the irritating symptoms of anxiety as he watches them carry the cranial container away from the dome. At the far end of the clearing, three Amco-paks are piling brush and deadfalls. Another group of vans approaches, laden with mangled carcasses. The Nords follow single file. Perhaps they intend to add Itubi to the pyre. Why not incinerate him along with the rest of the defective equipment? The Auditor finds this a satisfying thought. A man reaps what he has sown; destruction awaits all destroyers. Itubi has earned his Inferno.

Vera never leaves the house. She sleeps in one of the high-ceilinged bedrooms upstairs. The canopied bed is her grandmother’s; rococo mahogany posts twist up past a fringed vault, carved pinecones ensure fertility. The blood-red satin sheets, however, are from a shop on La Cienega Boulevard, a gift from some forgotten Oscar winner. On the floor is the skin of a tiger Vera shot from elephantback while the guest of the Maharajah of Cooch Behar. The room is a delight, filled with the favorite possessions of a long lifetime: hand-painted porcelain dolls, a collection of glass paperweights, mechanical tin orchestras, all childhood relics lost along with the family heirlooms and furniture when a crippled Flying Fortress jettisoned its bombload on the Mitlovic estate before crashing in the mountains. Every day, Vera turns up another souvenir from her past: a scrapbook of publicity stills stolen from her Hollywood apartment, boxes of misplaced jewelry, dried flowers pressed between the pages of unread bestsellers, a tiny crystal vial filled with tears shed at the funeral of her noble Italian husband.