The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (99 page)

*   *   *

“What we need is a new communications center,” Wheat said.

He stood at his window, looking out past the tower to where the sun was settling toward the sea horizon. The sea had become beautiful in his eyes and the cracked walls of his home were ugly. His wife, old and bent-backed, was ugly, too. She had lit a lamp for her work and she made ugly movements at her loom. Wheat felt emotion going to his head like a white storm.

“There are too many gaps in our knowledge of the universe,” he said.

“You're babbling, old man,” his wife said. “I wish you would not go out and get yourself drunk every night.”

“I find myself cast in a curious role,” Wheat said, ignoring her ugly comment. “I must show men to themselves. We men of Palos have never understood ourselves. And if we here at the heart of the Machine cannot understand ourselves, no human can.”

“Don't come around begging me for money tonight,” his wife said.

“I'll ask Central Solidarity for an appropriation,” Wheat said. “Twenty million ought to do for a start. We'll begin by building an Institute of Palos Communication. Later, we can open branches in—”

“The Machine won't let you build anything, old fool!”

The Being Machine decided to open its tower immediately, calling it,
Institute of Palos Communication.
The directives went out for the tower to begin its functions slowly, not putting undue strain on the emotions and intellect of the audience. Pressure would be increased only when people began asking questions about the authority of god(s) and about the grounds of moral and spiritual life. The trouble over validity forms made the task difficult. But all guiding of humans must begin with the people of Palos.

With its plasma optics system the Machine wrote on the sky.

Refined communication requires a carefully constructed conscience, allowing people to disobey the laws of god(s) only by payment of certain suffering and pangs. People must know what is required of them before they disobey …

The message was so long that the blazing light of it outshone the setting sun, filled Palos with an orange glow.

The Being Machine compared its present actions with the Prime Law, noting the prediction that one day humans would stop running from the enemies within and would see themselves as they really were—beautiful and tall, giants in the universe, capable of holding the stars in the palms of their hands.

“I've spent my whole life watching that machine and I still don't know what its specialty is,” Wheat said. “Think of what that damn thing has taken away from us in all the—”

“It was put here to punish us,” his wife said.

“That's nonsense.”

“Somebody built it for a purpose, though.”

“How do we know that? Why couldn't it be purposeless?”

“It's killed people, you know,” she said. “There has to be some purpose in killing people.”

“Maybe it's just meant to correct us, not punish,” he said.

“You know you don't kill people to correct them.”

“But we haven't done anything.”

“You don't know that.”

“What you're suggesting wouldn't be reasonable or just.”

“Hah!”

“Look,” Wheat said pointing across the plaza.

The Machine had changed the glowing label on its lower level. Now, the glittering letters spelled out:
INSTITUTE OF PALOS COMMUNICATION
.

“What's it doing now?” Wheat's wife asked.

He told her about the new sign.

“It listens,” she said. “It listens to everything we do. It's playing a joke on you now. It does that sort of thing, you know.”

Wheat shook his head from side to side. The Machine was writing half-size letters below the new sign. It was a simple message.

Twenty thousand cubicles—no waiting …

“It's a mind bomb,” Wheat muttered. He spoke mechanically, as though the words were being fed into his vocal system from some remote place. “It's meant to break up the stratification of our society.”

“What stratification?” his wife demanded.

“Rich will speak to poor and poor to rich,” he said.

“What rich?” she asked. “What poor?”

“It's an envelope of communication,” he said. “It's total sensory stimulation. I must hurry to Central Solidarity and tell them.”

“You stay right where you are,” his wife ordered, fear in her voice.

She thought of what they'd say at Central Solidarity.

Another one gone mad …

Madness happened to people who lived so close to the Machine's heart. She knew what the tourists said, speaking of the Palos idosyncrasies.

Most of the people of Palos are slightly mad. One can hardly blame them …

It was almost dark now, and the Machine wrote bright letters in the sky.

You give the credit to Galileo that rightly belongs to Aristarchus of Samos …

“Who the devil's Galileo?” Wheat asked, staring upward.

His wife had crossed the room to stand between Wheat and the door. She started past him at the blazing words.

“Pay no attention to it,” she said. “That damn machine seldom makes any sense.”

“It's going to take something else away from us,” Wheat said. “I can feel it.”

“What's left to take?” she asked. “It took the gold, most of our books. It took away our privacy. It took away our right to choose our own mates. It took our industry and left us nothing but things like that.”

She pointed to the loom.

“There's no sense attacking it,” he said. “We know it's impregnable.”

“Now you're sounding sensible,” his wife said.

“But has anyone ever tried talking to it?” Wheat asked.

“Don't be a fool. Where are its ears?”

“It must have ears if it spies on us.”

“But where are they?”

“Twenty thousand cubicles, no waiting,” Wheat said.

II

He turned, thrust his wife aside, strode out into the night. He felt that his mind was sweeping away debris, flinging him down a passage through the night. His thoughts were summer lightning. He did not even see his neighbors and the tourists forced to jump aside as he rushed toward the tower, nor did he hear his wife crying in their doorway.

The flame with which the Machine wrote on the sky stood motionless, a rounded finger of brightness poised above Palos.

The Being Machine recorded Wheat's approach, provided a door for him to enter. Wheat was the first human inside the Machine's protective field for thousands of centuries and the effect could only be described by saying it was as though an external dream had become internal. Although the Machine did not have dreams in the literal sense, possessing only the reflected dreams of its charges.

Wheat found himself in the center of a small room. It appeared to be the inside of a cube about three meters on a side. Walls, floors and ceiling were aglow.

For the first time since rushing out of his home Wheat felt fear. There had been a door for him to enter but now there was no door. All of his many years settled on Wheat, leaving his mind threadbare.

Presently a flowing blue script wrote words on the wall directly in front of Wheat.

Change is desirable. Senses are instruments for reacting to change. Without change the senses atrophy …

Wheat recovered some of his courage.

“What are you, Machine?” he asked. “Why were you built? What is your purpose?”

There no longer are any clearly definable ethnic groups in your world …

The flowing script reappeared.

“What are ethnic groups?” Wheat asked. “Are you an entertainment device?”

Words flamed on the wall.

Confucius, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard III, Einstein, Buddha, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Richard Nixon, Parker Voorhees, Utsana Biloo and Ym Dufy all shared common ancestry …

“I don't understand you,” Wheat complained. “Who are these people?”

Freud was agoraphobic. Puritans robbed the Indians. Henry Tudor was the actual murderer of the Princes in the Tower. Moses wrote the Ten Commandments …

“That sign outside says this is an Institute of Communication,” Wheat said. “Why don't you communicate?”

This is an exchange of mental events …

“This is nonsense,” Wheat snapped.

His fear was returning. There was no door. How could he leave this place?

The Machine continued to inform him.

Any close alliance between superior and inferior beings must result in mutual hatred. This is often interpreted as repaying friendship with treachery …

“Where's the door?” Wheat asked. “How do I get out of here?”

Do you truly believe the sun is a ball of red-hot copper?

“That's a stupid question,” Wheat accused.

Mental events must consist of certain sets of physical events …

Wheat felt a venomous spurt of anger. The Machine was making fun of him. If it were only another human and vulnerable. He shook his head. Vulnerable to what? He felt that something had dyed his thoughts inwardly and that he had just glimpsed the color.

“Do you have sensations and feelings?” Wheat asked. “Are you an intelligent being? Are you alive and conscious?”

People often do not understand the difference between neuron impulses and states of consciousness. Most humans occupy low-level impulse dimensions without realizing what they lack or suspecting their own potential …

Wheat thought he detected a recognizable connection between his questions and the answer, wondered if this could be illusion. He recalled the sound of his own voice in this room. It was like a wind hunting for something that could not be found in such an enclosed place.

“Are you supposed to bring us up to our potential?” Wheat asked.

What religious admonitions do you heed?

Wheat sighed. Just when he thought the Machine was making sense it went nattering off.

Do you sneer at ideas of conscience or ethical morality? Do you believe religion is an artificial construction of little use to beings capable of rational analysis?

The damn thing was insane.

“You're an artifact of some kind,” Wheat accused. “Why were you built? What were you supposed to do?”

Insanity is the loss of true self-memory. The insane have lost their locus of accumulation …

“You're crazy!” Wheat blared. “You're a crazy machine!”

On the other hand, to overcome the theory of self-as-a-symbol is to defeat death.…

“I want out of here,” Wheat said. “Let me out of here.”

He drew in a deep, chattering breath. There was a cold smell of oil in the room.

If the universe were completely homogeneous you would be unable to separate one thing from another. There would be no energy, no thoughts, no symbols, no distinction between the individuals of any order. Sameness can go too far …

“What are you?” Wheat screamed.

The Prime Law conceives this Being as a thought-envelope. To be implies existence but the terms of a symbol system cannot express the real facts of existence. Words remain fixed and unmoving while everything external continues to change …

Wheat shook his head from side to side. He felt his entrapment here as an acute helplessness. He had no tools with which to attack these glowing walls. It was cold, too. How cold it was! His mind was filled with desolation. He heard no natural sounds except his own breathing and the pounding of his heart.

A thought-envelope?

*   *   *

This Machine had taken away all the world's gold one day, so it was said. Another day it had denied people the use of combustion engines. It restricted the free movement of families but permitted the wanderings of tourist hordes. Marriage was Machine-guided and Machine-limited. Some said it limited conception. The few old books remaining held references to things and actions no longer understood—surely things the Machine had taken away.

“I order you to let me out of here,” Wheat said.

No words appeared.

“Let me out, damn you!”

The Being Machine remained uncommunicative, occupied with its TICR function, Thinking Ideating Coordinating Relating. It was a function far removed from human thought. The nerve impulses of an insect were closer to human thought than were the functionings of TICR.

Every interpretation and every system becomes false in the light of a more complete coordination, and the Machine TICRed within a core of relative truth, seeking discreet rational foundations and dimensional networks to approximate the impulses commonly called Everyday Experience.

Wheat, the Machine observed, was kicking a wall of his cubicle and screaming in a hysterical fashion.

Shifting to Time-and-Matter mode, the Machine reduced Wheat to a series of atomic elements, examined his individual existence in these energy expressions. Presently, it reconstituted him as a flowing sequence of moments integrated with the Machine's own impulse systems.

All the eternal laws of the past that have been proved temporary inspire caution in a reflexive thinker,
Machine-plus-Wheat thought.
What we have been produces what we seem to be …

This thought carried positive aspects in which Machine-plus-Wheat saw profound contradictions. This mode of mentation, the Machine observed, held a deceptive clarity. Sharp limitation gave the illusion of clarity. It was like watching a shadow play which attempted to explore the dimensions of a real human life. The emotions were lost. Human gestures were reduced to caricature. All was lost but the illusion. The observer, charmed into belief that life had been clarified, forgot what was taken away.