The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (98 page)

“Oh, we got us several months. One thing you can depend on with Slorin, they are cautious. They don't do much of anything very fast.”

“I don't want to leave,” Barton Marie said.

“It won't be forever, child,” Painter said. “Once they give up hunting for us, we'll come back. Slorin make a planet pretty nice for our kind. That's why we tolerates 'em. Course, they're pretty stupid. They work too hard. Even make their own ships … for which we can be thankful. They haven't learned how to blend into anything but a bureaucratic society. But that's their misfortune and none of our own.”

*   *   *

“What did you do about the government survey people?” Smeg asked Pzilimin, bracing himself as the car lurched in a particularly deep rut.

“I interviewed them in my office, kept it pretty shadowy, wore dark glasses,” Pzilimin said. “Didn't use the … mindcloud.”

“That's a blessing,” Smeg said. He fell silent for a space, then: “A damn poem keeps going through my head. Over and over, it just keeps going around in my head.”

“A poem, you said?” Rick asked.

“Yes. It's by a native wit … Jonathan Swift, I believe his name was. Read it during my first studies of their literature. It goes something like this—‘A flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey; and these have smaller still to bite 'em; and so proceed ad infinitum.'”

 

THE BEING MACHINE

I

It was hot in Palos that time of year. The Being Machine had reduced many of its activities and sped up its cooling system.

This season is called hot and desolate,
the Machine recorded.
People must be entertained in such a season …

Shortly after noon it noted that not many people were in the streets except for a few tourists who carried, slung around their necks, full-sense recorders. The tourists perspired heavily.

Some local residents, those not busy with the labors of survival, peered occasionally from behind insulated windows or stood shaded in the screen fields of their doorways. They seemed to float in muddy seclusion beneath the lemonade sky.

The nature of the season and the environment crept through the Machine. It began sending out the flow of symbols which guarded the gateway to imagination and consciousness. The symbols were many and they flowed outward like silver rivers, carrying ideas from one time-place to another across a long span of existence.

Presently, as the sun slipped halfway toward the moment when it would levy darkness, the Being Machine began to build a tower. It called the tower
PALACE OF PALOS CULTURE
. And the name stretched across the tower's lower stories in glowing letters taller than a man.

At an insulated window across the plaza a man called Wheat watched the tower go up. He could hear the shuttle moving in his wife's loom and he felt torn by shameful reluctance, unwilling to watch the thought spasms in his mind. He watched the tower instead.

“The damn thing's at it again,” he said.

“It's that time of year,” his wife agreed, not looking up from the design she was weaving. The design looked like a cage of yellow spikes within a wreath of cascading orange roses.

Wheat thought for a few minutes about the subterranean vastness men had measured out, defining the limits of the Being Machine. There must be caverns down there, Wheat thought. Endlessly nocturnal spirit corridors where no rain ever fell. Wheat liked to imagine the Being Machine this way, although there existed no record of any man's having entered the ventilators or surface extrusions by which the Machine made itself known.

“If that damn machine weren't so disgusting—it'd be funny,” Wheat said.

“I'm much more interested in problem solving,” his wife said. “That's why I took up design. Do you suppose anyone will try to stop it this time?”

“First, we'd have to figure out what it is,” Wheat said. “And the only records which could show us that are inside there.”

“What's it doing?” his wife asked.

“Building something. Calls it a palace but it's going up pretty high. Must be twenty stories already.”

His wife paused to readjust the harness of her loom. She could see the way this conversation was going and it dismayed her. The slanting sun cast Wheat's shadow into the room and the black shape of it stretched out there on the floor made her want to run away. At times such as these she hated the Machine for pairing her with Wheat.

“I keep wondering what it'll take away from us this time,” she said.

*   *   *

Wheat continued to stare through the window, awed by the speed with which the tower was rising. The rays of the setting sun painted streaks of orange on the tower surface.

He was the standard human male, this Wheat, but old. He had a face like a vein-leaf cabbage, wrinkles overlapping wrinkles. He stood about two meters tall, as did all the other adults of the world, and his skin was that universal olive-tan, his hair dark and eyes to match. His wife, although bent from years at the loom, looked remarkably like him. Both wore their hair long, tied at the neck with strips of blue flashcloth. Sacklike garments of the same material covered their bodies from neck to ankles.

“It's frustrating,” Wheat said.

For a while the Being Machine conducted an internal thought-play in the language of the Kersan-Pueblo, exploring the subtle morphemes which recorded all actions now being undertaken as merely hearsay.

Culture,
the Machine recorded, speaking only for its internal sensors but using several vocalizers and varied tonal modes.
Culture—culture—culture
—The word fed on thoughtnourishment and ignited a new train of concepts.
A new Law of Culture must be homogenized immediately. It will be codified with the usual enforcements and will require precise efforts of exactness in its expression …

Wheat's window looked south past the district of the Machine and across an olive orchard that ran right up to a cliff above the sea. The sky was heavy above the sea and glowed with old sunset colors.

“There's a new law,” Wheat said.

“How do you know?” his wife asked.

“I know. I just know.”

His wife felt like crying. The same old pattern. Always the same.

“The new law says I must juggle many ideas simultaneously in my mind,” Wheat said. “I must develop my talents. I must contribute to human culture.”

His wife looked up from her weaving, sighed. “I don't know how you do it,” she said. “You're drunk.”

“But there's a law that—”

“There's no such law!” She took a moment to calm herself. “Go to bed, you old fool. I'll summon a medic with a potion to restore your senses.”

“There was a time,” Wheat said, “when you didn't think of medics when you thought of bed.”

He stepped back from the window, stared at the cracked wall behind his wife's loom, then looked out at the sun-yellowed olive orchard and the blue-green sea. He thought the sea was ugly but the crack on the wall suggested a beautiful design for his wife to weave on her loom. He formed the pattern of the design in his mind—golden scales on cascades of black.

Mirror memories of his own wrinkled face superseded the pattern in his mind. That was always the way when he tried to think freely. Ideas became fixed in ebony cement.

“I will make a golden mask,” he said. “It will be etched with black veins and it will make me beautiful.”

“There's no more gold in the entire world, you old fool.” His wife sneered. “Gold's only a word in books. What did you drink last night?”

“I had a letter in my pocket from Central Solidarity,” he said, “but someone stole it. I complained to the Machine but it wouldn't believe me. It made me stop and sit down by a scaly post, down by the water there, and repeat after it ten million times—”

“I don't know what it is you use to make you drunk,” she complained, “but I wish you'd leave it alone. Life would be much simpler.”

“I sat under a balcony,” the man said.

The Being Machine listened for a time to the clacking of the human-operated typers in the offices of Central Solidarity. As usual it translated the tiny differences of key touch into their corresponding symbols. The messages were quite ordinary. One asked the cooperation of a neighbouring Centrality in the relocation of a cemetery, a move required because the Machine had extruded a new ventilator into the area. Another ordered forty containers of watermelons from Regional Provender. Still another, for distribution to all Centralities, complained that tourists were becoming too numerous in Palos and were disturbing the local tranquility.

The Palace of Palos Culture will be programmed for a small increase in discontent,
the Machine ordered.

This accorded with the Law of the Great Cultural Discovery. Discontent brought readiness for adventure, made men live near the heights of their powers. They would not live dangerously but their lives would have the appearance of danger.

Bureaucracy will end,
the Machine directed,
and the typers will fall silent …

These concepts, part of the Machine's Prime Law, had submitted to comparative repetition innumerable times. Now the Machine recorded that one of Central Solidarity's typers in Palos was writing a love letter on official stationery, in duty time—and that a dignitary at Central Provender in the Centrality of Asius had sequestered a basket of fresh apples for his own use. These items fitted the interpretation of “good signs.”

“It's an artificial intelligence of some kind,” Wheat's wife said. She had left her loom to stand beside Wheat and watch the tower grow. “We know that much. Everybody says it.”

“But how does it think?” Wheat asked. “Does it have linear thoughts? Does it think 1-2-3-4—a-b-c-d? Is it some odd clock ticking away under the earth?”

“It could be a marble rattling around in a box,” his wife said.

“What?”

“You know—open the box at different times and you might find the marble almost anywhere inside the box.”

“But who made the marble rattle into our world?” Wheat asked. “That's the question. Who told it, ‘Make us one of those!?'”

He pointed to the tower which now stood more than one hundred stories above the plaza. It was a structure of glistening orange in the evening light, ribbed vertically with deep black lines, windowless, terrifying and absurd. Wheat felt that the tower accused him of some profound sin.

“Perhaps it incorporates its own end,” his wife suggested.

Wheat shook his head, not denying what she had said, but wishing for silence in which to think. Sharply glittering metallic devices could be glimpsed at the top of the tower where it continued to rise. How high was it going? Already, the tower must be the highest artificial structure men had ever seen.

*   *   *

A small band of tourists paused in the plaza to record the tower. They did not appear excited by it, merely curious in a polite way. Here was a thing to carry home and replay for friends.

It built a tower one day while we were there. Notice the sign;
PALACE OF PALOS CULTURE
.
Isn't that amusing?

After reviewing the matter to the extent of its data, the Being Machine found no path open for introducing culture into human society. It made the final comparatives in Kersan-Peublo recording that the described action must be internal, experienced only by the speaker. Humans could not acquire the culture facility from the outside or hearsay.

The need for new decisions dictated that the tower had risen high enough. The Being Machine capped its construction with a golden pyramid three hundred cubits on a side, measuring by the Judean cubit. The dimensions were compared and recorded. The tower was not the tallest in history but greater than the newmen had ever seen. Its effect would be interesting to observe, according to the interest-factor equations with which the Machine was equipped.

At the apex of the pyramid the Machine installed a sensor excitation device, a simple system of plasma optics. It was designed to write with a flaming torch on the interface between stratosphere and troposphere.

The Being Machine, occupied with selecting a new label for the tower, with analyzing the dreams in all the humans sleeping at that moment, and with constructing the historic analogies by which it amused its charges, wrote selected thoughts on the sky.

The books of Daniel and Genesis are as good as anything of Freud on dream analysis …

The words blazed across fifty kilometers of the heavens, dancing and flaring at their edges. Much later they were the direct source of a new religion proclaimed by a psychotic in a village at the edge of the phenomenon.

The value of adversity is to make gardens out of wastelands,
the Machine wrote.
A thing may be thought of only as related to certain conditions …

Analyzing the dreams, the Machine employed the concepts of libido, psychic energy and human experience of death. Death, according to the Machine's comparatives, meant the end of libido energy, a non-scientific idea because it postulated a destruction of deduced energy, defying several established laws in the process. Any other comparison required belief in the soul and god(s). The considerations were not assisted by postulating a temporary libido.

There must be a false idea system here,
the Being Machine recorded.

Somehow the symbol screen through which it sifted reality had gone out of phase with the universe. It searched through its languages and comparison systems for new grooves in which to function. No closer symbol approach to phenomena revealed itself. Lack of proper validity forms inhibited numerous channels through which it regulated human affairs. Thought ignitions went out from the Machine incompletely formed.