Margaret St. Clair (36 page)

The pylon-shaping process is still going on. The servos are using a good deal of force to make its elements cohere. The surface of the pylon appears to be, like that of the interior tunnel, angular and rough.

So far Jake has been using pre-existing parts of itself. Now a whole group of the servos —thirty at least —has withdrawn from the others and is waiting motionless. They a ren’t silent, though. A continuous series of clucking noises, some soft and some loud, is coming from them. Are they making something? Time will tell. For the nonce, they have a quality that is both brooding and broody, a sort of cross between spiders and hens.

Later: The servos finally have begun to move around and around vertically over the surface of the interior tunnel, spirally and overlappingly, while they spray something on it out of openings on their sides I didn’t notice before. It’s a pinkish, s pongy material that’s soupy and drippy at first but hardens to a deep cushion in a little while. Meanwhile, the external construction seems to have stopped.

The spraying of the interior tunnel goes on and on until the whole length of the tunnel is coated with it and all its roughnesses and angularities are erased.

The group of servos has moved on to the outside. Here, because of the gravity, it’s taking them considerably longer. But they seem to be spraying the exterior pylon with the same pinkish, fast -setting gunk they used on the inside.

Around and around and around, around and around and around. At last there comes a pause. The servos slip down the pylon and cluster around the opening of the horizontal internal tunnel. Another pause. Then a series of mighty creaks and groans begins, the shriek of metal on metal, a noise of unpliancy. It is coming, I think, from the towering, recen tl y sprayed shaft.

The noises get louder and more grating. They’re concentrated at the base of the shaft. The smooth oc tahedral top of the pylon is moving. It’s bending lower and lower. It appears to be descending toward —Toward the external opening of the tunnel. Oh, God. For a moment I feel as disgusted with myself as I chronically am with humanity. How could I have b een so stupid? For it’s plain that what Jake is trying to do now has been in the cards from the beginning, from the moment it conceived its idiotic passion for itself. The towering pinkish pylon, the long horizontal pink tunnel, for Jake’s last desperate a ttempts to consummate its love. Jake is going to try to diddle itself.

The servos have moved out of the way. The heavy pinkish shaft is almost horizontal now. It broaches the opening of the long, long tunnel. The tunnel seems to dilate the shaft enters i t.

The pylon is moving rather slowly. But at last it reaches the end of the tunnel and crunches against the plastic-coated memory banks. Slowly it withdraws, almost to the opening of the tunnel. It comes back again, a little more rapidly. Soon al l this p art of the computer establishment is vibrating with the blows. How long will it go on?

Well, I suppose there are three possible ways in which this situation can resolve itself. If the plastic the servos sprayed on the shaft and tunnel was provided with s omething like nerve endings, endings that could carry messages to a pleasure center somewhere in Jake, both parts of Jake could achieve something like orgasm. Then the mighty blows of the superpenis would stop, at least temporarily.

If there’s no such pleasure center, and no nerve endings to carry messages to it, Jake could stop diddling itself eventually because the idiot perceived the futility of its attempt.

Or, finally, Jake can keep on with the working of the superpenis in the supervagina until som ething breaks. Those are all the possibilities I can think of.

Later (I don’t know how much later): It’s still going on. Jake has at least one advantage over the mammals it’s aping. Its superpenis is incapable of detumescence.

The copulatory, reciprocal motion goes on and on. On and on and on. And on.

I have been counting the number of strokes the pylon makes in the tunnel. If one figures one stroke per minute —a reasonable assumption, considering the length of the tunnel —and considers that there h ave been three thousand six hundred strokes since I began to count, then there have been at least sixty hours of continuous copulation. By now it’s plain, at least, that Jake must be deficient either in nerve endings in its self-created genitals, or in an adequate cerebral pleasure center where nerve messages could be received. The even tempo of the strokes has never varied, after the first initial speeding-up.

This has been going on too long.

Later: I lost count, stopped for a while, and then began to count again. I have got to 2,300 this time, but it seems that Jake is slowing down. The strokes are certainly coming more slowly.

Finally, the pylon withdraws completely from the horizontal female shaft. It seems sadly altered, shrunken, and bulging haph azardly. Has there been some sort of detumescence, after all?

No, that’s not it. The pylon is beginning to crumble. The plastic that held it together has been worn away, eroded, by the long-continued copulatory friction. Jake not only didn’t provide nerv e endings for its genitals, it ignored the question of lubrication. The plastic that coated the pylon must have been of exceptionally high quality to have held the superpenis together for this long.

All activity has ceased. The servos seem frozen. I’m ge tting afraid, in the absence of any actions of its own, Jake may become aware of my sense organs, and infer from them that another individuality, besides its own messy conglomerateness, exists somewhere in it. I’ll have to be very careful. But I am genuin e ly curious as to what Jake will try next.

A better, more sensitive set of genitals, connected to a pleasure center somewhere in Jake? Actually, J’s center, as far as what used to be called a giant brain can be said to have one, is located not far from th e end of its supervagina. It shouldn’t be much of a trick for the servos to install a pleasure-sensing mechanism there, and key it in with a simulation of vaginal nerve endings. That would be the obvious thing to attempt next, and Jake is nothing if not o b vious. But it may be too convinced of that futility of its efforts to try again. Whatever it does, the computer remains ineluctably “it.”

Later: Still no action. The servos remain immobile. J. can’t have exhausted its energy reserves, and yet I don’t det ect the shadow of any kind of thought in it. Perhaps it really has given up and genuinely isn’t thinking of anything.

At any rate, the services to its personality banks haven’t ceased. I haven’t gone back into the deep freeze. At times, I rather wish I h ad …

Something is coming along the faintly luminous bottom of the tunnel. It’s quite small, smaller than the smallest of the servos, and it’s moving slowly and cautiously. Sometimes it speeds up a bit, into a momentary cautious scampering. I wonder whe re it came from. I wonder what it is.

I daren’t use my sense organs very much, but it seems that seven or eight more somethings are following the first one. I wish I could get a better look at them.

They almost seem alive, in a way that the servos, no matter how competent and busy, never are. There’s randomness in Jake, of course. It’s built in. A scrambler used to provide variety and change to our thought-lives But it was a mechanism, after all. It never gave the skyrocketing change, the vertiginous v a riety, of actual life. The somethings moving along the bottom of the tunnel move like living things.

I’ll risk it. I think —I hope —that Jake is too empty and exhausted to pay much heed to anything I do. But I’ve got to get a closer look at them.

Later: I’m glad I risked it. It would have been worth any risk. I never was more happy in my life.

Now I know that I’m capable of another emotion besides a loathing for humanity, a wan curiosity, and an even wanner wish to survive. What I feel now is love a nd never more intense and joyous, because what’s moving along the bottom of the tunnel is a group —a troop —I don’t know what one would properly call it —of raccoons. Raccoons. Black and gray, prick ears, seven-striped tails, burglar masks, skinny paws, beady eyes, and all. A delight of raccoons! My adorable striped-tailed darlings, it’s unbelievable how glad I am to see you! A delight of raccoons, alive and real, in the midst of Jake’s dreary madness and the etiolated, time-eroded personalities in Jake ‘s memory banks.

How had they managed to survive? Never mind, here they are. And if there are raccoons, may there not also be possums, whales, horned owls, jackals, toads? Perhaps the earth has somehow managed to clean herself from our human pollution.

The raccoons are beginning to scatter out, to investigate the chinks and fissures in J.‘s threadbare vagina. They scamper into crevasses, they stand on their hind legs and pivot easily on their lush, soft, bushy behinds and look about in all directions. I suppose those mountains of sweetmeats and pastries attracted them; their liveliness makes it seem that the food either couldn’t be consumed or was unsubstantial. And now, in the immemorial manner of raccoons, they’re beginning to investigate.

Their clever little paws, almost as adroit as hands, are being run into cracks, are pulling out wires, rolls of tape, panels of miniaturized circuitry. I wonder what they make of it all. Meanwhile, they’re getting nearer to Jake’s center, the point where, if anywher e , Jake is vulnerable. And the servos don’t move; they seem not alerted by the animal invasion. Has Jake already “burned itself out” in its protracted search for the consummation of an impossible love? I doubt it. But why are the servos so indifferent?

Now the ring-tailed wonders begin their climbing. They could almost climb up a strictly vertical surface, and here, with the irregularities and soft spots in J.‘s makeshift vagina to cling to, they can go very high. Up and up, pulling out and investigatin g whatever comes in their way. Fortunately, the voltages in J.‘s interior are very low. Fortunately, for I shouldn’t want my darling Procyon lotor to get a shock. (Was I a naturalist, I wonder, when I was alive?) And the computer remains inert, under all t h is murmuration of raccoons.

I feel a very slight —shock? The animals keep on pulling. Festoons of tapes and wires are dripping from their paws. The servos are at last galvanized into action, though rather slow action, at that. They start toward the dise mbowelers in a swift crawl. But I feel perfectly confident of the raccoons’ ability to elude any servo pursuit.

The animals scamper a few feet farther and repeat their poking and pulling. I begin to feel rather odd, dim and remote.

Am I going back into the deep freeze? If I am, I know I’ll never come out. Jake is breaking down, and it’s the last time.

Never mind. It’s all right. This is a happy ending, because things are safe after all. The future is secure in nonhuman hands. Thank God, I mean not han ds, but paws.

1981

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Book information

The Best of MARGARET ST. CLAIR

Edited by Martin H. Greenberg

Academy ■Chicago Publishers

Copyright © Margaret St. Clair, 1967: “The Wine of Earth” © 1977: “Idris’ Pig”; “The Gardener”; “Child of Void”; “Hathor’s Pets”. © 1978: “The Pillows”; “The Listening Child”. © 1979: “Brightness Falls from the Air”; “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”. © 1980: “Th e Causes”; “An Egg A Month From All Over”. © 1981: “Prott”; “New Ritual”; “Wryneck Draw Me”. © 1982: “Brenda”; “Short in the Chest”. © 1984: “Horrer Howce”. Copyright © 1958 by Satellite Science Fiction: “The Invested Libido”; Copyright © 1960 by Galaxy: “The Nuse Man”. Copyright © 1961 by Galaxy: “An Old-fashioned Bird Christmas”.

Published in 1985 by Academy Chicago Publishers, 425 N. Michigan Ave.

Chicago, Illinois 60611

Copyright © 1985 by Margaret St. Clair

Printed and bound in the U.S.A.

No par t of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

St. Clair, Margaret.

The best of Margaret St. Clair.

1.
Science fiction, American. 2. Fantastic fiction, American. I. Greenberg, Martin Harry. II. Title. PS3569.T118A6 1985 813’.54 85-18599 ISBN 0-89733-163-X ISBN 0-89733-164-8 (pbk.)

Back cover $4.95

THE
BEST
OF

This new series features work by outstanding women science fiction writers, both well-known and unfairly neglected. Many of the stories in these individual volumes have never before been collected in book form, making each of these works valuable as an overview of the author’s b e st work. The first two volumes are: The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley and The Best of Margaret St. Clair.

M ARGARET ST, CLAIR has been writing professionally since 1945. She is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the lat ter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes. As Rosemary Herbert points out in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, a story like “Short in the Chest” which features a “philosophical robot” psychologist called a “hux-ley, “

“… is remarkable for its portrayal of women and its grappling with questions of sexuality.” St. Clair has written more than 130 short stories and eight novels. This new collection of her best short fiction consists mainly of stories never before available in book form. Readers will find her writing extremely polished and her perceptions unusually sharp.

ISBN 0-89733-U4-8 Cover design by Armen Kojoyian

Table of Contents

The Best of Margaret St. Clair

Introduction:

Idris' Pig

The Gardener

Child Of Void