The Race for God (13 page)

What a crock,
he thought, trying to lend respectability to what I do.
Blast it, my libido is out of control! It’s deviated from deviance, taken me into a realm I’m ashamed to discuss with anyone.

But Gutan’s libido surged just thinking these things. The last movements and expressions of his victims remained clear in Gutan’s mind as he made love to their lifeless forms. They had been alive and looking at him only moments before.

There had been a male corpse one desperate, lonely night in Central Eassornia. It hadn’t been a gratifying experience, and afterward Gutan slept fitfully. He’d awoken in predawn darkness, feeling unclean.

Now he felt that way again. If he were exposed, society would call him a monster, a depraved necrophiliac. He agreed with that assessment, but it didn’t help him control the urges.

Urges! God, do I have urges!

He recalled reading the definition of necrophiliac in an unabridged word-processing program. They defined it in a detached way as “an erotic attraction to corpses,” and referenced psychiatry without applying a value judgment to the condition.

Sometimes it seemed to Gutan that he could do as he pleased in the privacy of his own bedroom. These prisoners had to die anyway, and he didn’t do them any real harm. He wasn’t a murderer! He might even have done the chosen corpses a favor, sending them from this world to the next with an act of love.

But was it really love? Of course not, he admitted to himself, sitting up in bed in the tiny sleeping compartment. These were not consenting adults.

He heard a faint and distant whirring, beyond the hum and drone of tires and engine, and this distant sound troubled him. When he attempted to concentrate on it, the sound hid like a crouching cat melting into shadow. Whenever he gave up the effort, the sound came back, and it hung there at the edge of his mind, like a bangle beyond the reach of a child.

It was like something he forgot to do, or forgot to consider. His mind raced, preventing sleep.

The amber-on-black mapscreen adjacent to his bed indicated that the Dispatch Unit was on autopilot, negotiating Route 990 between Bakerville and Nosalia. He lifted the Venetian blinds by his bed, saw pixtel poles and fences flicker by. He heard a radar blip, and at the bottom of the mapscreen saw the truck’s speed drop from 185 k.p.h. to the speed limit: 140 k.p.h. Presently a Wessornia Highway Patrol car came into view in the truck’s headlamps, parked on a shoulder just over a rise.

Passing the car, Gutan saw a panel of instruments inside, with dancing blue and red lights. Soon he lost sight of the vehicle, and in the ensuing moments didn’t hear sirens. He let go of the blinds.

All Dispatch Units could be driven manually or automatically-and Gutan did the driving about a tenth of the time, depending upon how bored he felt. When he drove, he knew that the autopilot was watching his every move, ready to go into operation if he made a mistake. He had made a few, sometimes caused by the opium he took, and always the rescue came just in time. He called it “the cavalry.” Mnemo was too valuable to be left entirely to human error, and he surmised that the autopilot probably had its own backup. Gutan worried sometimes that he would be called on the carpet for his driving record, for the mistakes that had to be documented somewhere in the computer system.

The microwave dish on top of the trailer brought in fifteen thousand televid channels, but a person could stand only so much of that. And Gutan didn’t enjoy book-tapes, word-processor video games or music. He only enjoyed intercourse.

Intercourse,
he thought, laying his head back on the pillow.
Didn’t that word mean the union of two individuals?
He returned to the troubling question of consenting adults.

What might he call his act? It wouldn’t be phrased so nicely in dictionaries or journals of psychiatry. Solocourse? But that seemed more appropriate to something else entirely, and he laughed sardonically.

The truck negotiated a turn, began the ascent of a steep hill.

Such troubling thoughts, and that elusive sound. The vibration hung there, toying cruelly with him. Was it like the resonance emitted by Mnemo, the one that brought forth images of strange geometric shapes? He couldn’t taste enough of it with his ears to tell.

Why was he thinking this way?

Gutan swung out of bed, pulled open the door of his sleeping compartment. Mnemo was straight ahead, bathed in the lambent yellow light that suffused its walls. The wide instrument console and the separate government-installed computer were dark shapes—the former a rectangle against the illuminated machine, the latter a nearly square box off to one side.

How like the government,
Gutan thought,
to employ such an unimaginative square shape for its computer.
Professor Pelter’s Mnemo, in comparative majesty, was a graceful pedestaled pentahedron with an oval door on its sloping front face.

Out of the darkness before Gutan’s alternate, nonphysical eye came the vision of a sound, in great leaping, darting hunks of orange and lilac Mobius shape. They spun inwardly upon themselves like living, moving neon images, stretching into every imaginable Mobius shape. The square shapes pranced across triangular and circular ones, and like cubs or kittens playing, they switched roles. They blended, bounced from one another, and ultimately stretched to synchronized roundness—a roundness that was barely perceptible to Gutan.

Now the sound came as noise through this alternate non-physical channel, as from a great unobstructed distance where an event is seen before it is heard. It seemed to be Mnemo’s, the peculiar characteristic whine of the Mobius bands, and he felt its magnetism entering the pores of his body, drawing him forward, luring him.

But Mnemo, seen to Gutan’s physical eyes, had grown dark, and to his physical ears it made absolutely no peep. Previously he had recognized a division of sight—of the physical and nonphysical eyes that looked into different worlds, and he discovered now that the same separation existed with respect to his hearing. He had an alternate ear to go with his alternate eye, and conceivably there might be other alternate senses to go with these. He was hearing and seeing in a different plane of reality.

The realms were overlapping in certain places, folding over upon themselves to make him aware of them.

Mnemo flashed on in both planes, and to all of Gutan’s eyes the machine became a brightly illuminated polychromatic blend of geometric shapes that floated within Mnemo’s wall panels. Each shape was a different, delicious color, with an integrity of its own that at times showed clearly and at times slipped beneath or atop other shapes, forming odd combinations of shape and hue.

He saw no Mobius strips now.

Gutan had imagined many times what it might be like to enter the machine, and in a sense this seemed like just another vision, a dream. But when he attacked it with this thought, he realized it was a form of reality he had only touched tangentially before. The speculations and estimations of survival odds he had made concerning a trip through Mnemo came back, and they seemed entirely meaningless to him.

Everything seemed meaningless, even what lay beyond Mnemo’s door.

The oval door swung open.

Gutan regretted his behavior, felt his acts were tearing at the core of his life, shredding the source of his energy. He became conscious of his unbathed, opium-saturated odor and nearly gagged. If only he could rid himself of the guilt, if only he could escape the trap his life had become.

In one oft-imagined scenario, he would enter the machine only after setting it to operate for a certain number of minutes, after which it should automatically shut down. Mnemo had many controls and combinations of settings of unknown purpose, and in the short period that Gutan had worked at this job he had figured some of them out. The combination he thought might activate a timer involved two pick buttons, a brass toggle and a dial, all with numerical designations. Somehow they were tied in with a narrow black screen that ran vertically along the right outside edge of the instrument console.

Once he had mistakenly pressed a button after setting another button, a toggle and a dial according to instructions from HQ, and the narrow black screen went on briefly, clicking off red numerals in hundredths of a second like a stopkron. This set off error lights and buzzers on the adjacent government computer, and had the effect of shutting Mnemo down. Gutan had to repeat the procedure they wanted.

Gutan felt like a person who had received an elaborate electronics package without an adequate instruction manual and with no way of sending for one since the manufacturer was out of business. In this case the manufacturer was not only out of business, he was out of commission—killed in his own machine. This gave Gutan pause.

Professor Pelter had known the most about Mnemo.

As Gutan stared into the interior of Mnemo, he felt fear and suspicion. He wondered if this might be part of the clandestine government experiment, turning him into a subject in the dark of the night. But to what purpose? Gutan couldn’t offer data beyond what they might learn from other subjects.

Maybe they had been playing psychological games on him to make him want to enter the machine. Maybe voluntarism was a yet untested variable, an important one.

Or maybe he had outlived his usefulness, especially if he knew too much. This could be the normal retirement method for Mnemo operators, the reason for turnover in the department, which had led to him getting the job. Could it have something to do with his trysts? Mnemo had become an execution machine, and Gutan was a criminal by the standards of society.

But one deserving death? He thought not.

The machine grew closer. Its lights and patterns became brighter, larger. Gutan didn’t think he was moving his feet. The motion of approach was too smooth, as if his eyes were camera lenses zooming in. He couldn’t look down, couldn’t move his head or eyes to look at anything except the mesmeric, dancing lights of Mnemo.

He was moving forward rapidly, but the passage seemed to take forever. Mnemo became unfocused, disappeared, and Gutan seemed to penetrate the glowing yellow place where the machine had been. To the rear without turning his head to look, he saw Mobius bands in varying sizes and configurations chasing him. He felt short of breath and cold.

The bands caught him, and the twist in each adhered to his body and spread gelatin over him. He felt a spiked tingling, saw electrical waves, cycles and pulses all around. As Gutan lengthened the distance between himself and Mnemo, the Mobius bands straightened and became a billion parallel lines, joined impossibly at the point of Gutan’s body.

Gutan could hardly breathe. He was spread-eagled on a huge platform of white lines that knifed and accelerated into an inky abyss. Fear enveloped him.

He was traveling toward a far off pinpoint of light at a speed that jellied his mind. The light did not change size, but he reached it nonetheless and merged with it. The light was so intensely hot that it melted his body and everything that clung to it.

But something remained of Gutan. He heard the familiar whine of Mnemo, and saw a flash of brilliance that shifted from lilac to orange. Once again he saw the pinpoint of light from the abyss, and he was on a plane of parallel lines speeding from the light. He became as he was, as he came to realize he had always been, and pleasantly warm. The shortness of breath passed.

All was silent.

He lay dreaming of a dreamer, and that dreamer dreamed of another dreamer, and these were part of an infinite sequence of dreamers, all locked in to Gutan. He sensed an expansion of memory: blank spaces became turgid with events, too many events for one life. Ancient instincts became identifiable and subject to scrutiny, not just intimations controlled by the subconscious.

He had no subconscious anymore. All events and motivations had surfaced and organized themselves before him. They lay as objects on a great platter stretching across the universe. He was about to pluck one and examine it, when this image vanished, and he felt his body folding inward.

The universe stretched to infinite smallness.

The whine of Mnemo returned, and it seemed to come from Gutan’s own throat. He sat within an infinite mass that enveloped every pore, with only the vision of Mobius bands all around and the bodily sensation that he was sitting in weightlessness.

“Am I dying?” he asked. It was a thought without words or throaty texture, without tangibility. But it came forth nonetheless.

No answer ensued.

He saw a tiny key turning in a gigantic doorway, and an elongated light switch that flicked to “On.” For an instant he heard music, a peculiar, jaunty tune.

A whirl of faces, landscapes, buildings and colors filled his mind, focusing momentarily before fading. Then a single blurred vision held, and. presently an image became clear: a white sand beach, with turquoise blue water stretching to the horizon. The images shifted, as if seen from a person walking, but Gutan felt no corresponding body sensations.

A large log loomed ahead, half embedded in sand, and around it were footprints, human and dog. A woman in a yellow calico dress moved gracefully across the vision, sat on the log. She was extraordinarily lovely, with porcelainlike skin and long black hair that streamed like a gleaming mane in the ocean breeze.

Gutan’s pulse quickened. He knew this face, or an approximation of it—an older version, he thought. Faded photographs were dim in his memory. It was his mother in her youth, the way he had seen her only in photographs.

How was he seeing this?

Then the realization hit him, as if he’d been clobbered with the big beach log:
My father! I’m
. . .
I’m in his mind!

He knew this from the way his mother looked toward him, with the wan, loving expression she always reserved for Gutan’s father.

They embraced, and eagerly the man pulled the dress and underclothes from the woman, revealing untanned, firm breasts and a birthmark on one side of the stomach. They rolled off the log onto her clothing, made love with animal frenzy.