The Perfect Host (41 page)

“Don’t cry. It’s better this way,” Mayb radiated to the weeping woman. “It’s better for him. He never could have been happy, even if men left him alone. Poor, poor unfinished little thing—imagine the life he’d have, always able to speak, never to know when he shouted or screamed, and never being able to hear except with his ears—the only nontelepath in the whole world!”

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
in his mind but a warm blackness, or perhaps a very dark redness. There was a field of it in which he was lying, a sheet of it over him; the field reached from his back into infinity and the sheet was as thick as the universe. The darkness was in his eyes and in his lungs, in his bones. He was part of the darkness, inside and out, through and through.

He could never know how long it was that he stared at the spot of light before he realized that it was there. There was no way of telling how large it was—or how small—how near or how distant. It was vague; it had no discernible limits, no edges. It grew until it was an oval patch of clear yellow light in the surrounding darkness.

And at last it was more than a patch of light; it was a hole in the darkness through which he could see. He saw a mechanical elbow, a housing from the ends of which two metal arms extended down and into the impenetrable darkness beside him. The arms were moving rhythmically.

Something was fraying the edges of the oval hole. A translucent border ate away at the darkness, continuously feeding the patch of clear light, slowly pushing back the darkness.

And then he began to feel—a surge of sensation, a tickling, prickling wash of feeling. It had the rhythm of the moving metal arms. It was pins-and-needles, “my foot’s asleep,” the seed of unconsciousness in the lungs of a man being gassed. It was comfort and agony; as it grew and as it faded he wanted to laugh, but when it was at its peak he wanted to scream.

When at last he could see everything around him he did not know when it was that the widening hole had become the real world, spreading to his horizons and beyond, having eaten and eaten at the
dark until the last round speck of black had ceased to exist somewhere behind him, far, far out in infinity.

The housing above him with its pair of moving arms was only one of many, one of eight. The sixteen arms reached down to his body. At their ends were padded packages of something—something which pulsed and tingled—and the arms were making these packages massage his skin, back and forth, down and back, over and over, with the same firm pressure, the constant rhythm. This rhythm paralleled the washes of prickling agony, of tickling pleasure.

He was lying on his back, naked. His body was free. Either he could not move it or he did not think of trying. His head was clamped; he felt a padded band on each side. Suddenly this seemed an affront, an insult. He moved his head—and was rewarded by a stab of anguish which came, not from within him, a protest of disused muscles, but from outside, from the head-clamp.

He did not try to fight it. Lying quite still he felt four thick needles being withdrawn from the back of his neck, easing a pressure he had not known was there. When they were gone he began to suffocate.

The light dimmed. The spot of red-blackness reappeared and grew, spreading fast—much faster than it had left him. Now it was his horizon—now its edges were an oval before him—now they had enclosed the housing above his head. With the growth of the darkness a pressure that became a pain grew into a tearing agony, unbearable. All the pain and all the fear that had ever been, since the beginning of time, sat on his chest.

To move it, to get away from it, to stop that deadly agony, he breathed.

When he drew in the first breath the darkness stopped growing. When he breathed again the oval of light widened and the pain lessened. With yet another breath, the oval widened again and stopped, and the pain became even less. With each breath he drove back the darkness. So he breathed more deeply, a little faster. It became easier to do as the darkness and the pain fled away from him, to his horizons, back and around behind him somewhere, dwindled to a patch, a spot, a speck—and ceased to exist.

He laughed then, and moved his head confidently against the clamps. They broke and fell away—

The inside of his mouth, his tongue and his teeth, were ice-cold. The rest of his body was warm—too warm on the outside, around a core of cold. Having laughed and moved his head, he fell asleep, still on his back, but with his head turned sidewise and a smile on his lips. The arms, with their pulsing, tingling pads, kept working while he slept.

The veil of sleep had thinned about him and was easily torn by the breath of laughter which awoke him. He opened his eyes and lay looking, seeing nothing but the laughter—it was gone, but he could see it: a rushing of golden steps; veined gold, the veins full of wind-whispers, for it was not a completely voiced laugh, but partly an alive, joyful expulsion of unwanted pressure.

At first he thought it was the memory of his own laugh, but on looking, as it were, at the fingerprints of the laugh—on the particular sensory impressions the sound had made he found them not in his throat, as if he himself had made it, but in his ears.

He sat up. Blood roared in his head. Blackness closed, filmed, and cleared away. He raised his head and saw that the metal arms were folded up out of the way now, motionless. He was on a complicated bed, over which was a great transparent hood. This had separated at his right and a second had slid downward—a section the full length of the bed. It was an invitation, and though he was conscious of no desire to move, he reacted to the fact of the open door. He swung his legs out and sat on the edge, and began to tremble with weakness. He looked around.

There were three lights, two of which he could see, the third one under a deep shade. One was over his head, one on the wall, the shaded one between him and the wall, flooding another bed like his with light. On it the eight pairs of metal arms were moving rhythmically, the pads at their ends pressing and caressing a woman. It seemed that the pressure of them went down into the body, coating itself like a paint on the bones, layer on layer, and he knew, somehow, that these layers were life, and that when they were thick enough to include the skin the whole woman would be alive. It must be, he
thought (in a way which was not thought at all) that a part of her must have been alive before the pads started moving, so that they would have something on which to lay their paint. She must have been—the alive part—only a wire woman, a line drawing of living threads, one for each arm, one for each leg, one for the torso, and a knot for the head.

She was naked. Her body was young and firm. It interested him only as part of the moving unit, with its padded arms stroking and pressing. He slid off his bed to the floor, cushioning his fall with knees and hands. His elbows refused to hold him up and his chin went almost to the floor. He stayed there for a moment in an equilibrium like that of his first breath, when he had stopped the darkness but had not yet driven it back. Then, as he had done before, he threw off the discomfort and straightened his elbows, his back straining to help. He dragged himself across the floor and squatted back on his haunches to watch.

To watch, he had to hold his head up higher than normal. It hurt to do this and he began to tremble again, but for a long, tense period—three minutes, four perhaps—he watched. The pads moved on her feet, pressing and stroking; at every third stroke one would sweep around and run up the sole of her foot, from heel to toe. Another pair tended her calves, one inside, one outside. The flesh beneath them swelled and hollowed, swelled and hollowed into complete quiescence while the inside pad made its special trip—one in every fifth movement—over her kneecap. There was a pair of pads for each thigh, running from the knee to the hollow of her groin, and a pair which danced around each other to alternate with them on the groin then to follow upward to the lower ribs and back. Another pair swept between her breasts and downward, around to the back and up to the ribs, where the others had finished; every twelfth stroke pressed downward from her collarbones to her solar plexus, ignoring the route around to her back.

He watched in wonder. After a short while his head sagged. He turned it, and fell asleep again, squatting his cheekbone on his knee and the top of his head against the side of the woman’s bed.

It was another sound that awoke him the next time. Again he
opened his eyes and looked for it, found it and examined it, though it was gone. Again he failed to find the imprint of it in him anywhere, and he understood, too, that it was not from the woman. The laugh—the second one—had been hers; he knew that. This new sound came from neither of them.

He raised his head and, doing so, swayed forward. He put out an arm to keep from falling, and the act further awakened him.

The woman was lying beside him, sprawled brokenly on the floor. She looked at him and away, looked around her—and back to him again. She lay as if she had done what he had done—as if she had left her bed and slid to the floor. But she had not crawled; she lay there beside him, taking in the room, his bed, herself, and him.

“Gowry”

That was the sound, coming again. It did a strange thing to him. He looked for the source of the sound. He could not find it, but inside he—recognized something: those syllables meant something of surpassing importance, but he could not determine what it was—

“Gowry!”

He looked for the source of sound and could not find it. He saw that the woman was looking at him.

“Gowry!”

He looked again—and saw it. It was a cone, its wide mouth pointing at him, its throat a smooth, bland disc of metal. He turned to the woman, and she was looking at him.

There was a silence. He thought,
When it says “Gowry” I look for the sound and she looks at me
.

“Gowry”

He looked at the cone quickly, and then at the girl. The thing had spoken and he had looked at it, but she had looked at him.

He said, “Gowry.” His mind reached out, comprehension close—

“Gowry—” the woman faltered.

He nodded. He understood now—he was Gowry.

“Gowry?”

His breath hissed out in response; he drew in more and tried again: ’Yes-s-s,” he said. “Yes.” Then: “Yes, s-s-silf—Tilsa—Tilsa.”

“Tilsa,” said the woman.

They were quiet for a moment, looking at each other. The cone said,
“Tilsa!”

She looked at the cone, and he looked at her. He understood immediately that she was Tilsa. She was Tilsa; he was Gowry.

He put out his hand, and she looked at it. He was not yet strong enough to hold it up; it fell to the floor beside her, and she stared at it. Then, swiftly, unexpectedly, sleep overcame her.

For a long while he squatted there, looking at her; then he slept too.

He awoke with an awareness of something within himself. He lay with his eyes closed, relaxed and receptive. He knew, somehow, that he was strong now, that if he moved he would not tremble—knew it so well that he did not have to try to move.

There was a skin full of knowledge within him—a thin skin, stretched tight by the knowledge it held. The knowledge swirled and swelled, stretching the skin tighter and more transparent every second. He saw things inside the skin—

A bearded face. A clutter of rusty, crumbled ruin. A flight of dart-shaped aircraft, with a sound to them like a blow-torch in a barrel. The sun shining on rolling green lawns, and, repeatedly, black, starspangled space in which a cloudy planet floated. The tones of a voice were there too, circling and weaving amid the swirling knowledge. The voice meant something to him. Suddenly he knew what it was; it was the voice which had said,
“Gowry!”
and
“Tilsa!”
—the voice from the cone. It was not his voice; it belonged to a thing—a person, someone who knew him, knew Tilsa, too—everything about them.

“Gowry—”

He opened his eyes. Tilsa was awake, still lying on the floor, looking at him and smiling. He was on his bed; he must have dragged himself back to it in the beginnings of sleep.

Suddenly, harshly, he said, “Be quiet.” He hardly realized he had used the words. Her call had punctured the skin of knowledge within him; it burst and flooded his mind, a bewildering deluge. He shut Tilsa out with his voice and eyelids, to be alone with the knowledge again.

The bearded face was—Alan. Alan was Tilsa’s father. He was dead. The ruined cities were dead. The flights of dart-like aircraft had killed them. The rolling green lawns were outside his room—was it a room? Wasn’t it more a machine, some kind of equipment?

The room, or machine, was by itself, away from all the world, carved out of a forest on the floor of a deep ravine in mesa country. The ravine was deep, wider at the bottom than at the top, most secret. He remembered sunlight on the lawns because they used to snatch at it, he and Tilsa, as it whisked by day after day, for their hurried half hour of basking as the stripe of sunlight swept fingerlike over their hidden buildings.

The world was mad. The world was an insane worm, toothed and hating itself. It broke itself in two, in four, in eight, and each part was toothed and hating itself and all the other parts. Each part fought, biting and tearing at itself and the parts of itself in a fury of immolation. The worm was man, a species destroying itself, a race destroying itself; a culture, a nation, a city—a single human being snapping and snarling at his internal selves.

“But you’ll be saved,” Alan had said. “The radioactive dusts will soon be filtering down to us, even out here. You can imagine what it must be in the cities. Most of them will die, most of those who don’t will be sterile, and probably the few who can breed won’t breed true. But you will, you and Tilsa; you’ll do it—
there
.”

“There” was the cloudy planet, afloat in space. Its clouds were not like the ones here, its atmosphere held different elements, poisonous to the animals of Earth. They would have been to Gowry and Tilsa too, then—before their long sleep, the longest sleep any humans had ever slept; before the tireless, meticulous workings of their bed-machines. Their bodies had “stopped” completely, through and through, and then the cells had been altered, each a little, to rest awhile, and then to be altered a little more.