Margaret St. Clair (35 page)

Most of the poetry is in English, with Italian a close second (Dante, I suppose). In English, Jake runs to paraphrases of Shakespeare: “For in my sweet thought I would be forgot/If thinking on me then should make me woe,” and Keats: “My warm, white, lucent thousand-pleasured breast,” be s ides a lot of lesser poets and a lot of versification that is, I suppose, original.

Since Jake has all the recorded languages of the entire earth to draw on, there are also what seem to be Japanese haiku, Chinese folk songs, French chansons, Spanish reco ncillas, Russian chastushka, and I don’t know what all. There is probably some amatory verse in Ainu, and if there is, I am sure Jake is using it.

Jake seems to be finishing up with a huge glob in the European koine that has been the dominant language in the EEC for the last eight hundred years. I wonder how long this has been going on. It seems like days and days. Any curiosity I had about Jake’s poetic abilities has long ago been satisfied.

Later: The verse making finally stopped. There came a pause, a breathless, expectant pause. Jake was waiting for an answer from itself.

None, of course, was forthcoming. (Unless the computer can manage a satisfactory split in its personality, none ever will be.) Finally J. began another protracted rummaging throug h its memory banks. I think —but am not quite certain —that it was going through all the data on advice to the lovelorn that its memory banks contained. I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought I was in for another torrent of poetry. But I began to fe e l rather cold.

Cold, cold and dark. An increasing blackness. All services to the now-fused individualities within Jake —the services that Jake had been originally created to provide —all services had ceased. I was losing consciousness. It occurred to m e, as I blacked out, that Jake had had a quarrel with itself. I was being annihilated because of a lover’s tiff. It was a ridiculous way to go.

I died. (If it is asked how anything as thin and tenuous as I am, a mere sentient point, can speak of dying, t he answer is that the point had ceased being sentient.) I had ceased to exist, even in the qualified sense I had existed before. It didn’t hurt at all. There was no body to be hurt. It was certainly an easy, if ridiculous, way to die. But I think I really died earlier, when I first became a part of Jake’s memory banks.

Later: Things seem back to normal. I came out of the deep freeze without any distress. But I wonder what the messy monster will try next. There’s a sense of preparation in the air.

I believe that what I thought was a lover’s tiff was in fact a deliberate attempt on Jake’s part to waken love in itself for itself by being cold —withdrawing from itself. The computer’s equivalent of being “hard to get.” It’s a time-tested, obvious ploy that h alf the personalities within Jake must have tried to employ when they were alive. It didn’t work, of course. But there must be a lot more data on what to do in love difficulties in J.‘s memory banks. I can only wait and see what it does next.

My “thought thought-detector” is picking up something that sounds like “Me jinklo, me jinkli, me tover, me pori. Me kokosh, me catro, ada, ada, me kamav!” It certainly sounds like jibberish, but the computer has access to a lot of languages I don’t know. This doesn’t seem to be poetry, though it’s being chanted. It’s already been repeated a dozen times …

“Me jinklo, me jinkli” is running through Jake’s mentation as inescapably as, to quote my great-grandmother, “Silent Night” rings out over public address systems at Christmastime. The old lady lived to be two hundred and three and was a dedicated diarist.

Odd, that I can remember being told as a child what great-grandmother had said or written, and yet don’t know what sex I was as a child! “Blindly the iniquity o f oblivion scattereth her poppy,” Browne said, and where my recollections are concerned, he certainly was right.

“Me jinklo” is fading away, but Jake isn’t waiting the usual wait to see what the results of its chanting are. It seems to be going directly into another ambit, something that involves a fluttering and screeching. It’s a —wait, now —it’s a bird. A medium-sized bird, with rather pretty brown, gray and buff spotted plumage. But it’s writhing its neck about and hissing like a snake, which rathe r detracts from the effect.

I can’t quite make out —oh, here come some of the servo-mechanisms. They’re tying the bird to a wheel, spread-eagled, and the wheel is beginning to spin horizontally. The rim of the wheel is glowing, and now it bursts into fla me. (I trust this is what is actually happening: I can’t see any of it, and derive my knowledge from Jake’s thoughts.) Now there’s something about laurel leaves, salt, and libations. All this seems dreadfully familiar. There’s chanting going on in the ba ckground. I’ve encountered this before.

Later: It was thickheaded of me not to have realized before what the computer was up to. The chanting was an incantation, the wryneck bound to a fire wheel was a love charm, and the salt and laurel leaves were an a ttempt to coerce the beloved by making him waste away until he —in this case, it —relented. Jake lifted the whole thing from the pages of Theocritus. I imagine the “me jinklo” bit was some sort of love spell too.

I suppose I’ll be in for a long bout of love magic, until Jake finally decides it doesn’t work and tries something else. One curiosity I do have is about the computer’s image of itself. Does it see itself as a beautiful young girl? As a plain, fat, middle-aged man or woman? A handsome young ma n ? Or is it, in its own mind, nothing but an unappeased longing? My knowledge of Jake’s thoughts is somewhat spotty, despite my “thought thought-detector.” A mild curiosity, and a profound hatred of human beings, are the only emotions I have left.

The chanting is giving way to bonging, the bonging to what is probably bull roarers, and the bull roarers to an indrawn silence. I imagine Jake is meditating —no, it’s started up again. I have the impression of fifty people all gabbling at once, and at the tops of their voices. Well, my demented host has thousands of years of love charms to get through. J. is persevering, if nothing else.

-

Later: At last, when I really thought I’d have to unthink my “thought thought-detector,” Jake has shut up. A blessed ment al silence. But if it’s not going to be love charms or erotic poetry, what will it be? Jake can’t be giving up.

I begin to smell something. (I mean, I feel Jake smelling it.) It’s a warm, yeasty, buttery smell, like home baking. Very good, really. But I don’t see how Jake’s love quest ties in with this.

Oh. Of course. The computer, having exhausted love magic, has picked up the homeliest of adages, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and is acting on it.

The computer establishment is flooded with delicious odors. Mountains, torrents, avalanches of pastry, fancy baking, and the trickier sorts of home-baked bread are pouring forth. Enough to feed an army. Condes, napoleons, petit fours, madeleines, gaufrettes, bagels, pain d’é pice, brioc he, salt-rising bread, babas, Sally Lunns —I can’t begin to enumerate them all. If Jake’s beloved existed except as an alter ego, it would be suffocated under this abundance. Like a man drowning in a vat of whipped cream.

How “real” the mountains of pastry and sweetmeats are, I have at present no way of knowing. Jake certainly admires them very much, commenting favorably on their brownness, crispness, sweetness, lightness, and enticing perfumes of butter, caramel, vanilla, and rum. Question: Does Jake’s having elected to try this particular way to a man’s heart mean that J. thinks of itself as a man? As a woman? Or does it have any particular ideas on the subject? On reflection, I find I don’t much care about Jake’s mental processes. Actually, I’m sick o f Jake.

I keep wondering what the outside world is like now. I remember how Jake —that is, the whole vast computer establishment —looked on the day I made my translation into its banks: huge towers, with pylons tall enough that a few of the pinnacles re ached up through and pierced the pall over the earth. And connecting the towers, in an intricate tracery of lines, more than a hundred long, light, arching, glass-smooth bridges.

Why did Jake’s designers think the bridges necessary? There is no traffic between the towers, only an infrequent rolling of small servo-mechanisms over one or two of the lower connecting spans. The whole construction is futuristic nonsense. One of the designers must have seen something like it in a picture and imitated it.

And underneath the towers, pinnacles, stabbing Gothic spires of this nightmarishly bad plastic joke, there’s nothing but a roiling, heaving sea of stinging yellowish fog, strong-smelling, hostile to gentle life.

Oh, I wish I could see the earth again the way I saw it once when I was a child, the green hills gentle, studded with golden poppies and blue lupins, violets and a dozen other flowers. And beyond the hills, the incomparable splendor and radiance of the white foam and blue water of the sea.

I was lucky. I saw the beauty of the earth in one of the few islands of that beauty that were left. It must all be gone now … The proper epithet for human beings is not “sapient” or “toolmaking” or even “game playing.” We are Homo raptor.

Meantime, the mountains of pastry are growing even higher.

-

Later: Jake went on with its fancy baking a little longer. Then there was a slight pause, and J. began to create candies and sweetmeats. Truffles au chocolat came first, to be followed by almond, pecan, and walnut brittle, marzipan shaped like fruit and glittering with sugar, pastel bonbons, chocolate-covered nuts of every description, caramels, nougats, pralines, coffee nuggets, boiled sweets, fudges —again, I can’t begin to enumerate them all. Is this wave of c a ndies resting on top of the previous mountains of pastry? At any rate, there seems to be room for everything.

The candy-making seems to be slackening. A few more trays of Victoria brittle materialize. A pause. And now, through Jake’s sensors, I perceive a new smell. Herby, thymy, oily, sharp, and over all, the smell of the divine herb, garlic. It’s a pleasant change from all that sugary stuff.

I suppose — yes, Jake has turned its talents toward salad making. We’re getting Caesar salad, Chefs salad, Russ ian salad, tossed green salad, potato salad, avocado and grapefruit, Waldorf, alfalfa and mung bean sprout salads, and even an assortment of lowly coleslaws and some wilted lettuce and dandelion greens. Pickles, relishes, chow-chows, kim chee, and antipas t o follow. Yet I seem to feel a sort of despair in Jake’s thoughts as it works its way back through the cuisine toward soup.

Without any perceptible pause, Jake’s food production has switched from salads to meat dishes. But there’s not nearly the abundanc e here that there was earlier. Sweetbreads en brochette, steak Diane, saddle of venison, broiled salmon steaks and a few others, and then everything stops. I feel a long and somehow exhausted silence. But Jake can’t really have given up. It may have run o u t of optimism temporarily, but I doubt it has run out of ideas.

I wish I could curl up somewhere and go to sleep.

Actually, being “dead” —being in the deep freeze —wasn’t half bad. It didn’t hurt at all, and there was no anxiety connected with it. Bu t I think my thought processes have been a little slow ever since. It’s as if a human brain had been a little too long deprived of oxygen, without being made positively imbecile. Perhaps some of my circuits —the electrical circuits that make up my dim an d ghostly personality —may have been damaged or corroded in the long wait.

One thing I really don’t understand is how Jake can be so infernally stupid. Weren’t there, among the billions and billions of personalities in its memory banks, any geniuses, her oes, poets, saints? What became of those who “left the vivid air signed with their honor”? Jake isn’t so much a case of the lowest common denominator as it is a reaching of the lowest level of the lowest. The only answer that comes to me is my former anal o gy of stirring up all the colors in a box of paints.

Much later: There’s an enormous sense of bustle, of intense preparation, in Jake’s thoughts. It seems to have decided to focus all its resources (which used to be coterminous with the resources of the entire planet) on one last attempt. Changes —gross physical changes —seem to be taking place in a considerable portion of the enormous computer establishment. The mounds, the mountains, the avalanches of food have been cleared away, and shapes and struct ures are being tried and discarded one after another kaleidoscopicallv. It’s very confusing. I wish I kne w —really knew —what is going on.

J. seems completely absorbed in this latest attempt I think —yes, I think it’s safe to risk it. In this vast expenditure of energy, any minute drain I might make ought to go unnoticed. I’m going to “think” real sensory perceptors for myself into being.

Later: My eyes and ears have been in existence now for what seems a considerable time. And I still have no ide a what’s going on. It seems there’s a parallel construction and removal taking place. But why? And of what? I’ll try to sort out for my own satisfaction what I actually perceive.

Well, then, the servo-mechanisms seem to be clearing a space about fifty ki lometers long in Jake’s entrails. I had to “think” an extension of my visual system into being to make out that much. What they’re clearing out seems primarily personality storage banks. It makes me a little alarmed. What if my own cell should be among th e m? But the servos appear to be concentrating on the older elements.

The cleared space is linear with, as far as I can make out, a slight curvature along its length. At one end it comes up against a blank wall of undisturbed personality storage banks. The other end of the long tunnel appears to be open to the air outside (if it still is air). The diameter of this horizontal shaft is about ten kilometers. These measurements are wholly approximate, of course. The surface of the tunnel is angular and rough, w hich is only reasonable considering what has been removed to make it.

The construction —but I am much less sure of this than I am of the removal —seems to be external. It’s a towering pylon, without the Gothicism of most of Jake’s architecture, probabl y a few kilometers longer than the interior tunnel and probably a little greater in diameter, with a roughly hexagonal tip. I believe it’s being constructed out of the memory banks that the servos previously removed from J.‘s interior. Admirable economy! Waste not, want not. It contrasts strongly with J.‘s profligacy when it was trying to win itself by its achievements as a cook.