Children of Infinity

by Roger Elwood

  CHILDREN ARE WEALTH . . . CHILDREN ARE WEALTH . . . LARGE FAMILIES ARE HAPPY FAMILIES . . .

  Eventually, I came to the monitoring board for that wing, a crude device far less efficient than those scopes on the upper floors. It was composed of fifty small television screens that provided views of different parts of the long, main corridor and of the extension pockets where excess cells were placed in those days. Many of the screens were burned out or too fuzzy to be useful. Still and all, I found the renegade on the eighth screen of the second row from the top. He was in one of the cul-de-sacs, attempting to break through the hive wall into what he most likely fancied was freedom.

  Already, he had worked several inches into the plaster and would shortly be gone from my jurisdiction.

  On my left, another screen burned out. The monitoring board hissed, crackled, became silent again. I was unnerved to see this happen even in the oldest part of the hive. Didn’t Thunder see?

  I could stand there and wait until the others answered my call, or I could go ahead without them and take the risks by myself. If I waited, the renegade might very well break through the wall. I did not want the guards in another facet of the hive to have the distinction of apprehending him, and I knew I must take him alone. It was the least I could do, I thought, for Thunder who had done so much for me.

  I sounded the alarm. Although it was soundless, I knew the others would soon be on the way, for my call had gone directly to Thunder and was then relayed to my associates on that lowest floor.

  Turning from the board, I hurried down the corridor, seeking the cul-de-sac where the renegade was attempting to escape. He heard me coming, turned from his work, and raised what appeared to be a weapon of antique design. I stopped, cautious and observant, waiting for an opening.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he said.

  I said nothing. There was no need for me to speak to his sort, and I would feel tainted addressing a renegade. My only duty was to see that he was taken, that he was disposed of.

  I started slowly toward him.

  He fired at the floor between us. Smoke gushed up and hung low under the ceiling.

  Where the projectile had struck, a hole decorated the floor, ragged, several inches deep. He had used this instrument to chip away at the wall of the hive, and he would use it to kill me, if he must. I stood perfectly still, waiting, certain that I was his superior and that he must make a mistake as surely as Thunder watched over both of us.

  He said, “Stand where you are—and listen to me for a moment.”

  I looked at him, expressionless.

  “When you see what’s happened, you won’t want to kill me any longer. You’ll want to help me, to do something about this mess.”

  I put out a call to the others again, then I deigned to speak to him. “You’ve gone renegade. You’ve lost your mind.”

  “No,” he said. “For the first time in centuries, I’m sane. I know who I am—Warren McElfey, twenty-eight, married, an accountant with two kids.”

  “You’re a Worker,” I said. “Only the ancient savages had need for names.”

  All other renegades I had known were timid, quivering, confused creatures that ran from me in terror and were easy to snuff out. This man’s self-assurance made me break my code of silence. He had had the presence of mind to find a weapon, and he knew how to use it. He seemed sincere, although I knew that he was deceitful.

  “I was one of the savages,” he said. He waited for a reaction, saw that I was unimpressed, and said, “I was alive when this whole thing started, although I can’t remember much of it after all this time. There were so many people back then . . . The suspended-animation cells had already been developed and put into use to cope with some of the excess population.”

  I wondered where the others were. Thunder should have relayed my call; they should have been there by now. Surely, Thunder could not be sluggish in his response.

  The renegade held the weapon on me, unwavering. “You saw the tronic-signs? You saw the messages?”

  I was surprised that he knew about them, for that would mean his reactions were superhuman, as mine were. “You were a police agent?”

  “Yes. But, answer me, you saw the signs, didn’t you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And you don’t wonder about them?”

  “What’s to wonder about?” I asked. The poor creature had no control over his mind, no sense of logic. I pitied him, and asked Thunder to bless him.

  Rage passed across his face, subsided. “I can’t be angry.” he said. “I imagine that I was like you when I hunted for Thunder.” He pointed the weapon at me. “I must show you some things. Move.”

  I backed into the corridor, looked for the others, saw no one, considered issuing another call but decided that would be an insult to Thunder. Instead, I said to the renegade, “Where are we going?”

  “Farther down the corridor, to the end.”

  He was still vigilant, trained to the role of the hunter and as capable as I was. I did as he asked. At the end of the corridor, where there was little light and a great deal of dust, he pointed to an odd architectural device that caused the floor to descend, bit by bit.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Stairs. You won’t have remembered them. Go down. They take you to a time before Thunder.”

  I hesitated.

  “Go.”

  The rooms below Thunder were strange indeed. Bones lay everywhere, white, webbed by spiders, scattered over the floor, piled in corners and at doorways, empty eye sockets staring, teeth grinning without benefit of lips. I shuddered, seeing death, for the first time, in such unholy concentration. But for the renegades, none of us died. Thunder preserved us, dreaming, in the suspended-animation cells. The horrors of the pre-Thunder era were brought forcefully home to me.

  “Some of the upper levels had been built,” the renegade said. “And circumstances had become so difficult that the de-populationists either had to act violently or lose all hope of defeating the breed-crazy populationists.”

  I looked around at the skeletons and parts of skeletons, and I said, “War, then?”

  He smiled. “Yes. A very one-sided war. The de-populationists had small families or no families at all, while the populationists bred and bred. It was clear, from the start, who could summon the most soldiers.”

  “I don’t understand your terms,” I said. “ ‘Populationists’ and de-populationists’ are—”

  “This way,” he said, motioning me with his weapon.

  We found more stairs and went down again. The renegade told me that the stairs moved at one time but had long ago rusted to a stop. I wondered if Thunder knew about the breakdown, and why he had not repaired things.

  Eventually, we reached an area vaguely reminiscent of the upper floors of the hive: unsectioned, a large chamber with distant, almost unseen walls. In the middle of the floor stood a sleek, glimmering form with viewing posts on all sides of it. The renegade explained that this was a mock-up of a vessel once destined to journey to the stars. He had to explain to me what the stars were, and he did well at making them sound real. I knew that he was insane.

  At the second viewing stand, as I read the brief paragraph of script on the black podium, I said, “I still don’t understand.” At the time, I thought that I was only humoring him until help could arrive—although I must have even then been possessed of a dangerous spark of genuine curiosity.

  “There are dozens of floors beneath this one,” he said. “They burrowed deep into the earth before they started building toward the sky. The population crush was desperately heavy. Perhaps society would have collapsed had they not discovered the star drive. But they developed a laboratory model and convinced themselves that they could populate the stars. This gave the populationists the ammunition they needed. Now, they said, we not only did not need birth control, but we actually required a rapid expansion of the population. If we were to people a billion worlds, we must breed faster. They develop
ed the suspended-animation cells to stave off death and to store the excess citizenry when they could not build conventional dwelling units fast enough.”

  I watched the ship, expecting it to move. I realized I should watch the renegade more closely, but I could not. “We haven’t reached the stars though,” I said, humoring him.

  “Exactly. They were prepared to wait thirty years for the first starships to be built, another twenty years for full emigration to begin. But they didn’t count on Thunder coming along first, with ideas of his own.”

  I turned from the ship. “What do you mean?” I felt the bulk of the starship pressing down on me, immense.

  He was eager to explain. He must be lonely, anxious for a friend, existing without the comforting aura of Thunder. “In order to further the cause of the starships and—not incidentally—the populist doctrines, scientists developed means of utilizing the mental capacities of the millions of minds stored in the suspended animation cells. They linked the dreaming minds together, each brain a storage depot for data and a creative thought cluster as well, forming a combination of mechanical and organic computer units that would be able to solve the problems of interstellar travel much sooner than expected. And since the populationists were in charge of the government, the super-computer would also be able to devise strategies against the de-populationist forces.”

  “And then the war?” I asked, fascinated despite myself, remembering those acres of bleached bones.

  “Yes. The de-populationists were generally nonreligious or members of unpopular mystic cults, for the major faiths urged the citizenry to ever greater efforts of population expansion. Even the social minorities were against them, since many minority groups felt birth control was merely a tool to keep them in the minority and, therefore, powerless. When it came to battle, then, the de-populationists were the minorest of minorities. After the first bloodbath, the de-populationists were rounded up and put in suspended-animation cells where they would contribute to the super computer and to the populationist cause. The government disliked wasting a single man.”

  “I don’t see what Thunder has to do with this,” I said. I looked back at the starship. It was huge, proud, haunting in its stillness.

  “The super-computer was built some nine hundred years ago, fifty years before the skirmishes between the populationists and their enemies. Thunder evolved shortly after that war.”

  “Evolved?” I asked, disbelieving.

  “At some point, the millions of interconnected human minds developed so many extra-individual synapses that they gave birth to an overall intelligence, a superbeing that bore no resemblance to any of its human pieces, an intelligent computer half mechanical and half organic. Thunder did not resemble any of his human pieces. He was inhuman and superior. The computer,

  Thunder, soon stopped working for mankind and began his own projects. Covertly and eventually overtly, he assumed control of society, through hypnotic, subliminal commands that were carried on all communications networks. In time, he learned to create new children—which were only new computer links to him—in test tubes, eliminating the need for man-woman relationships. He ordered everyone into cells, then, to increase his intellectual capacity. He offered us a limited choice: death or eternal life as a slave in one of his cells. He no longer cared about the stars which, originally, the computer had been meant to help us conquer. Indeed, he wanted to keep us bound to the Earth where we were his slaves. Now, perhaps, his intellect has grown too large. He is going schizoid.”

  “Thunder is well,” I said.

  “I know that he is not.”

  “How have you found out so much in so short a time?” I asked. I decided to place another call to Thunder.

  “It hasn’t been a short time,” he said. “I’ve been a renegade for two weeks.”

  “Impossible! Thunder knows immediately.”

  Warren McElfey smiled. “Does he? Then why hasn’t he responded to your alarms? Why hasn’t he alerted your teammates?”

  “He has.”

  “Where are they?”

  I did not answer.

  “How many renegades do you think there are?” he asked.

  “Few.”

  “Hundreds every week now,” he said. When I did not reply, he said, “When you return to your cell, Thunder will help you forget this one. Maybe an hour from now, he’ll wake you again—although you’ll think you’ve been dreaming for months. It’s all falling apart.”

  “You’re mad,” I said. “I won’t listen.”

  He babbled on, as if he could disprove my charge. “The dreams of pleasures Thunder feeds us help to keep us subservient. We have women and wealth in those dreams—while women dream of men and wealth—and we have adventure and excitement. But he’s breaking down, and sometimes the dreams don’t filter into a cell properly. Left without dreams for a day, the cell occupant wakes—and becomes a renegade.”

  A policeman’s mission rarely lasted more than two or three hours; then he returned to his cell and the dreams. I shivered at the thought of missing out on them for an entire day. And a lifetime without them would be empty, hollow, bereft of joy.

  Behind me: footsteps. I turned and saw the others enter the old museum, looking bewildered but still capable. I shouted to them, and they formed a semicircle around the armed renegade, waiting for him to make one small error of judgment. . . .

  He knew he had failed to convert me, and he knew he would die. Yet he would not stop his spiel. “I can show you cells where the life processes were not nourished properly and all that’s left are rotting corpses. There’s one level in particular where three-quarters of the occupants are dead in their cells.”

  We murmured at this blasphemy, and it occurred to us that he might taint us with his madness and ruin us for Thunder. With that in mind, his weapon did not matter now. We moved forward, leaped upon him as he fired two bolts of amber light. Two hunters died. Then the gun was smashed from his hands. We clutched his bare flesh. I felt my fingers on his throat, felt his windpipe crumpling as I pressed.

  Then I went for him with my teeth.

  I was sure Thunder watched.

  I was sure he knew.

  He would love me the more for my fanaticism.

  We dumped the ruined renegade into a disposal chute in the upper levels. He seemed to be grinning as he slid from sight, all his teeth showing in the remnants of his pallid complexion.

  We returned to our cells.

  I took hold of the grips, was raised from the floor, swung over the container of contact jelly, was lowered into it. The viscous stuff clung to me, sucked me down as if it were sentient and were happy that I had come home again.

  I slept.

  The dreams came from Thunder: beautiful women, magnificent foods and wines, travel, warm sun, my heavily muscled body lying prone on warm sand, an unpolluted sky, white beach, the roar of an endless sea, green lands, tall grasses, fine whiskies, flowers blooming in every hue, cool shade trees, a bubbling stream, fish swimming in the shallows, wines, sun . . .

  . . . and connections were broken as a child might snap the legs from flies; the darkness retreated into a hole no larger than a pinprick.

  Awake, I reached up and gripped the curved handles above me. Automatically, I was raised and swung free of the contact jelly, put down on the warm floor.

  There was a pleasant draught in the hive, and I was refreshed by it as I waited for Thunder to speak to me. Sometimes there were delays in the broadcast of his orders, for he often had to attend to other, sudden problems once he had called us awake.

  I turned away from my own cell and looked at the countless thousands of Workers who lay in their individual, transparent containers, dreaming so peacefully and producing the brain capacity for Thunder. Here was proof that Earth could support tens of billions of people, proof that we were meant to breed just as rapidly as possible.

  Thunder had still not spoken.

  I walked along the aisle, between the cells, enjoying this rare moment of
leisurely observation, feeling undeniably superior to all the other sleepers, as if my being awakened to serve Thunder was proof that I was a special child of his.

  I remembered the renegade who had last necessitated a police action, and I almost laughed when I considered his dour warnings. Now he was dead and forgotten, while the eternal hive dreamed on, as it always would, now and forever. By its continuous function, it put the lie to all the horrible things the renegade had said.

  Waiting for Thunder to give me my orders, I wandered through the cells, until I noticed something odd about one container directly ahead of me. When I inspected it, I found that the occupant had been dead for several days, perhaps even longer. . . .

  His eyes bulged from his pallid face. His tongue lolled.

  His flesh was somewhat corrupted, despite the stabilizing influence of the contact jelly that had partially evaporated around him.

  One hand had gripped the top rim of the cell with such ferocity, apparently during the man’s death throes, that it remained frozen there even now, a grotesque, grasping claw of bone and leathered skin.

  I turned away from the gruesome spectacle.

  I was frightened by the possibility that a cell had begun to malfunction without ever attracting Thunder’s attention, but my fear was not engendered entirely by this ugly prospect. My heart beat too rapidly, and my mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was also frightened because, as unlikely as it seemed, I was certain I knew the name of the dead man in that cell. . . .

  Men had no need of names after Thunder’s advent, of course. If I knew this dead man’s name, it was the one he had borne before the construction of the hive, a thing I could not know—unless I, too, had been one of those primitives—an impossibility.

  Yet . . . His name was Harrison Cole. I said it over and over, softly, as a horrible dread came over me. I looked around at the endless cells, in all directions, suspended from ceilings and walls, set upon the floor, filled with countless multitudes of mankind, and I became even more terrified.