Gray Matters (18 page)

Authors: William Hjortsberg

BOOK: Gray Matters

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Itubi pushes past the leaves and branches which camouflage his dugout, stretching his aching limbs for the first time since the previous night. He savors the warm sunlight on his skin and starts stiff-legged through the waist-high foliage. There is not a sound in the forest. Even the raucous jungle birds are silent. Itubi is certain he’s alone and unobserved. His thoughts of security are interrupted by his own startled outcry. A sudden searing pain, more virulent than any wasp’s sting, burns across his shoulder. Grimacing, Itubi reaches behind to feel the barbed shaft hanging from his flesh. Before he can pull it out, his knees buckle and he drops forward into darkness.

Philip Quarrels is buried without ceremony. Using an empty coconut shell, Vera scrapes a shallow pit in the sand. Chi-Chi is employed to move the corpse. A rope attached to a makeshift harness is tied to the dead man’s feet and the horse drags the body to the open grave, leaving a smooth trail across the beach like the track of an ovulating sea turtle. There are no prayers or obsequies. Vera rolls him in and covers him up.

Altogether, Vera spends considerably more time decorating the grave than she did preparing it. She pats the sand smooth in a high mound over the pit. Around the perimeter she arranges a row of queen conch shells, bleached white by the sun. In a second row, the shells are upside down to reveal the pink involute openings. Elsewhere, fragile slivers of the shattered lime skeletons of sea urchins are pressed into the mound in an abstract mosaic.

Vera is pleased with the result. She has arranged the grave so it can be seen through the open flap of her tent. Every day she will bring baskets of flowers and strew them over the mound. Down the beach she knows where to find a large lump of brain coral that will make a suitably ironic headstone. Vera looks forward to the histrionics of mourning. It will give her something to help pass the time.

Attention, B-0489 … Attention …

Obu Itubi recognizes the presence of his Auditor on the communicator. This is puzzling. He remembers leaving the dugout and the stillness of the forest, but everything else is vague, lost in blackness.

Attention, attention, B-0489. There is no point in playing mute, we know you are receiving this transmission.

Where am I?

Safely back in the bosom of Center Control. You will excuse me for being less precise, but the exact location would be meaningless to you.

What has happened to my body?

It was incinerated on Antilles Nine. You were cerebrectomized by a Healer there, a colleague of your unfortunate victim.

And what will happen to me now?

Your most interesting question, B-0489
…

I know I am at your mercy.

Very true. And since you showed so little of that commodity during your rampage in the Surface Installation, I imagine you feel a bit apprehensive.

I’m not afraid. There’s nothing more you can do to me.

You display your ignorance, B-0489.Center Control has on file pain so profound that your imagination cannot even begin to fathom the potential agony. We can condemn you to eternal purgatory by merely flipping a switch.

Do it then.

You are too impetuous, B-0489. That’s why you are so dangerous. Center Control has no desire for revenge. In spite of all provocation, I have not the slightest interest in “skewering you like a shish kebab. “

So, you know all my secret thoughts. I should have expected as much.

Your mistake was in having thoughts which needed to be kept secret. Center Control records the complete consciousness of every resident. There is no such thing as secret thoughts. Even your unconscious is on file. My mistake was in not making a daily audit. If I had, perhaps all this destruction might have been avoided.

You’ve been brainwashed by the System. The machines have tricked you out of more than your body; they’ve stolen your mind as well.

There is no such thing as individual mind, B-0489, there is only the One Mind. All else is illusion. But I won’t trouble you with further discourse on the Doctrine. You asked about your fate. I have been instructed by Center Control to inform you of their decision. As a result of your destructive actions, the brain of a Level I resident has been damaged beyond the possibilities of reconstruction. Although humanoid hatching and breeding facilities are maintained, the specimens produced have only a modified brain, so there is no chance of our laboratories supplying a replacement. Because of this fact, Center Control has ordered that your brain, B-0489, be substituted for the one destroyed. All of your thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, will be erased and the files of the other resident substituted.

So, you mean to kill me after all?

Not exactly; your files will be consigned to the Archives for storage until such time as another brain is available. In effect, B-0489, you are to be placed in limbo. Before I end transmission, you might be interested in knowing of the metaphysical debate your case has occasioned. Center Control is undecided what the karmic results would be if your files were erased instead of placed in storage. Would erasure equal death, and thus a new incarnation for you on another world?Or would you simply be cast adrift in the samsara forever, doomed to an eternity of illusion! You might well use your final moments to meditate on this question, B-0489. Neuron purgation procedures will begin immediately.

End transmission.

CLICK
.

Oona the Weaver sits in the sunshine of her garden, staring down past the green cultivated rows to the sea. A vibrancy of hummingbirds embellishes the flowerbeds; bees drone in the golden afternoon; a rooster struts and crows, parading his plumage along the top of the stone wall. Behind her in the house, her loom stands idle. Recently a vague dreaminess has overtaken her and she has done no work in days, sitting instead for hours in the garden, her hands folded in her lap.

Oona’s smile is peaceful and contented. There, she feels it again, for the third time today. She lifts her hands to the swollen sides of her stomach and feels the quickening within her body. She thinks of the tiny fetus, already perfectly formed, kicking out his unborn legs, restless with the novelty of life. Her joy is complete.

An Amco-pak Mark II moves silently between the narrow steel shelves in the Archives. Ranked along either side are endless file containers, catalogued and forgotten in the mortuary stillness. Clamped in his telescoping arms, the file machine carries the complete files of resident Obu Itubi. The square metal container is identified only by number: B-0489-M(773-22-99). After a moment’s scanning, the Mark II finds the appropriate shelf and slides the files into place. The aisle is too narrow to turn around, so the scanner turret pivots 180 degrees, the controls are set on reverse, and the machine backs smoothly out the way it came. On another shelf, two rows over, sit the files containing information on the whereabouts of a twentieth-century resident (female), the lost key to Vera Mitlovic’s freedom. A reconstituted Skeets Kalbfleischer is having a nightmare. Although this dream has occurred with increasing regularity over the past weeks, Skeets has yet to report the details to Y41-AK9, his new Auditor. It is always the same room, brilliantly hung with Sung dynasty scrolls and tapestries. The Emperor is always there, supervising from his teakwood throne, a slightly mocking smile playing about his thin lips. Skeets is strapped to the top of a porcelain-tiled table. As before, he is in a strange body: adult, well muscled, with copper-colored skin and a shock of fine coal-black hair.

The Emperor claps his hands and the torture begins. Three men enter the room, two of them pushing a brass-bound cabinet exquisitely fitted with dozens of tiny drawers. These two men assist the surgeon in selecting the proper instruments from the cabinet. A large mirror hangs over the table so Skeets can watch each detail of the operation. The surgeon works with skilled fingers, diligently removing tiny portions of flesh from his body. Each incision is in a different place. One cut removes a portion of earlobe, another takes the tip off his big toe. The surgeon is a master of his ancient craft; under his patient care a victim is kept alive for days as, bit by bit, his body is carved away. First, the skin is removed; next, the flayed muscles minutely diced. By avoiding vital organs, the surgeon whittles the body down to bones and guts, never allowing any one cut to induce shock or trauma.Although the pain is constant and unvarying, the victim is never allowed to lose consciousness.

Skeets watches the entire process; his eyelids were the first to go, thereby ensuring his unswerving attention. But even after his eyes are removed and he is reduced to a beating heart, a single lung, and the blanched stalk and blossom of spinal column and skull, Skeets is still able to witness the final moments of his dream. He sees it all in the mirror as clearly as if he still had eyes. One of the attendants produces a fine silver saw from an appropriately shaped drawer. With a few swift strokes, the surgeon uncaps the cranium and eases the brain out of its ivory nest. Gray and glistening, the wrinkled lump of nervous tissue is carried to the Emperor on a golden dish with the polite hope that it will please his discriminating palate.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4532-4660-3

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com