Inside Outside

by Philip José Farmer

  At once, the interior of the coffin-shaped cavity was filled with dazzling lines. The lines zigzagged like lightning and in all directions, seeming to project from the back and the sides of the cavity. They criss-crossed each other and became entangled in a snarl.

  He noticed that the light from the twisting threads was shining on something he had not seen before. The front of the cavity was not open as he had thought but was sealed with a transparent vitreous stuff.

  The lightning streaks continued to interplay, but now something was materializing in the cabinet. He shielded his eyes and narrowed them and peered into the glare. He could make out nothing except a darkness in the light, a man-shape. For a second, he thought he saw a skeleton standing before him, then, the bones were clothed in muscles, and organs were suspended in the cage of bones; lungs, heart, viscera. Abruptly, there was a sheath of muscles over all. Finally, skin. But it happened so swiftly he could not be sure; the whole process could have been a hallucination induced by the flicker and dazzle.

  A moment later, he knew it was no false image. There was a man standing in the cavity; he could see him clearly because the lightnings had ceased as suddenly as they had begun. The entrance to the cavity now seemed to be gone; there was no reflection of his figure on glassy stuff.

  The man was tall and well built and had long auburn hair and a long auburn beard. His face was young, that of a man of thirty, and he was handsome as a hawk is handsome.

  “X!” said Cull.

  X smiled and stepped out of the cabinet. He looked around him and blinked a few times as if he were awakening. From the other end of the room came Fyodor’s cry: “It’s X!”

  Fyodor shouted, “I’m coming, Master!” and he pushed violently against a cabinet and spread his arms out so as to enfold X at the end of his launch. He had forgotten caution, however, with the result that he shot at a slight upward angle and so passed X about two feet above his head. Wailing, waving his arms, he soared on up across the enormous chamber until he rammed into the wall. He screamed just before he struck; there was a thud, and he bounced off the wall. Unconscious, he drifted back toward them. Blood oozed from cuts on his face and forehead and collected in beads.

  Cull’s first thought was to try to rescue Fyodor. Then, he remembered the little man’s adoration of X. Anything that he, Cull, might say or do to X could result in Fyodor’s interfering. Better to let him float there, helpless.

  X stepped out of the cabinet and said to Cull, “My son, what can I do for you?”

  “The first thing you can do is forget that sonny stuff!” snarled Cull. “Let’s be honest. At least, you try to be honest. Tell me the truth.”

  X said, “What…”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Cull. “The same old runaround. What is truth? O.K. Tell me about me. What am I doing here? Tell me about this place. What is it? Why is it?”

  X frowned slightly, then smiled again.

  “Once there was a man who lived a good life. Or so he thought, and as a man thinks, so is he, isn’t he?

  “This man grew white-haired and wrinkled while the results of a good life piled up around him. He owned a big home, he had a faithful and uncomplaining wife, many friends, many honors, many sons and daughters, even more grandchildren, and some great-grandchildren. But, as all men do, he came to the end of his days and lay on his deathbed. He could afford the best doctors and medicine on Earth, but these…”

  “Hold it! Hold it!” said Cull. “I’ve heard that one before. More than once. Look! I don’t want any of your canned speeches, any of your deep dark riddles. I want answers to my questions. Plain simple easy-to-understand answers! If anyone has them, you do. So, start talking!”

  He glared at X and clenched his free fist. Then, the glare faded away, his eyes widened, his jaw dropped.

  He said, “You walked out of the cabinet! You’re not floating! You’re standing there!”

  “He who has faith,” said X, “may walk where other men fly.”

  Cull had to fight to keep from breaking into hysterical laughter. “I don’t want proverbs or parables!” he howled. “I want answers to my questions!”

  “First,” said X, “you must learn to phrase your questions properly. And that, my son, takes patience, labor, and wisdom. And it also takes faith…”

  “Faith that there are any answers?” said Cull. “I said I didn’t want any double-talk. I want to know! Now!”

  X stretched out his hands in a benediction and said, “Once there was a man who lived a good life. Or so he thought, and, as a man thinks, so is he, isn’t he?

  “This man grew white-haired and wrinkled while the results…”

  Cull screamed and launched himself at X. As he shot through the air, he pulled the flint knife from the wire belt.

  X did not move. He continued talking.

  Then Cull had gripped him with one arm around his neck. Both went down, with Cull striking with the knife as they fell. They struck the floor hard, but Cull did not let loose, fearing that he would propel himself away from X and drift helplessly in the air. X seemed to have weight, and Cull wanted to cling to that weight. Meanwhile, he drove with the flint into X’s breast, again and again.

  Blood spurted out from just below the beard, collected in globules, and floated away. X tried to say something but choked from the unrelenting pressure of the arm around his neck.

  Cull stabbed lower down on X’s body, into the solar plexus. Blood bubbled in X’s throat, and then it gushed out of his mouth.

  Cull became aware of someone screaming. It was Phyllis.

  He pushed himself away from X toward a tall cabinet and grabbed it to hold himself. He looked back at X. X was dead, and, dead, had lost his weight. With the push given him by Cull as Cull had propelled himself away, he now drifted, face down, a few inches off the floor. Presently, he nudged gently into a cabinet, and all motion ceased.

  Cull shouted at Phyllis, “Shut up! Shut up!”

  Phyllis, some distance away, clinging to another cabinet, stopped screaming but she was sobbing. She looked terrified.

  “Don’t worry!” he called. “I killed him, and there is no lightning from the sky! I killed him, you understand? I can do better than that! Watch!”

  He shoved another black disc into the slot, and he watched while the fibers of light danced and twisted around each other. Then, brief flickers of bone, of organs, of veins and arteries, of muscles.

  Finally, the cessation of light and another X. Or one who looked exactly like him.

  As soon as he saw the bearded man step out of the cabinet, Cull pressed a third disc into the receptacle. A fourth. Within several minutes, three X’s stood outside the cabinet.

  “All right!” shouted Cull. “Why don’t all of you, the Holy Trinity, start giving each other the old spiel? That’d be a new experience, wouldn’t it? Having to hear the canned speech you’ve been handing out to so many people? So, maybe you can answer each other, and I can eavesdrop on the end of the story, find out what the old man should’ve done?

  “Or don’t you know, either?”

  “What is it?” cried Phyllis. “I don’t understand this! What are you doing? Where’d they come from?”

  “I don’t know,” he shouted back. “But I’m going to find out if I have to skin them alive, take them apart piece by piece, unravel their nerves nerve by nerve, tear the truth out of their guts!”

  The three X’s turned to face Cull, and their mouths, moving in unison, said, “That won’t be necessary. I’ll tell you now what you would have heard very soon. Although it won’t allow you to carry the story to others. You can’t be a prophet here. Any more than the so-called demons could.”

  Cull grasped immediately that someone was using the three as transmitters and speakers. Also, as receivers.

  “Who are you?” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Just outside the shell of your world, man,” said the X’s. “I was on the point of entering when an alarm lit up. I investigated the source and fo
und that some obviously unauthorized person was using the X-discs. The soul-body transducer doesn’t normally turn out that many X’s in such a short time. So, I used the proper instrument — its title would mean nothing to you — and placed myself in rapport with the X’s.”

  Cull said, “You answered the second question. But who are you?”

  “Immortal?” said the X’s. “It’d be an exact title for my group but it wouldn’t distinguish us from you. Precursors? That would be a partial description only. Ethicals? Apt but not inclusive. Let’s say: Saviors.”

  “Saviors?” repeated Cull. “In what way do you save? And whom do you save?”

  There was a long silence. The three bearded men stood mutely, looking at Cull with expressions that he thought resembled those of sad sheep. Their arms hung by their sides, and they looked through him.

  Then, just as Cull was beginning to think that communication was cut off and that he’d better be getting out of this place before the so-called savior appeared, the X’s spoke.

  “I have been wrestling with the temptation to appear in person, and I have won. I will not show myself, for I would be so horrible in the flesh to you that you could not bear it. Not that I find you at all appealing, physically, though I love you as a being. I will continue to speak through these machines.”

  “Machines?” said Cull slowly.

  “Automatons of flesh and metal. Yes, these agents are synthetic and have no souls — right word? — because they are too simple to have any genuine intelligence. They do not have even a rudiment of self-consciousness. Their nervous system is as fully developed as any genuine human being’s, but they have almost no brain, as you know it. And when they act without control on our part, they do so automatically.

  “They are able to walk on the floor, for instance, because they have a very small gravity-governing unit imbedded in their bodies. If you were to dissect one of three, you would think that the unit was an organ.”

  Cull looked speculatively at the dead X floating above the floor.

  The X’s said, “Do not try to cut the unit from that body. You could not use it unless it were hooked to your nervous system. And, anyway, it will be destroyed by remote control.”

  So suddenly that it startled Cull and left him shaking, two of the X’s rose from the floor and soared toward the exit at the head of the stairs near the opposite end of the room. One paused briefly to examine Fyodor, still floating unconscious, then flew on.

  “They have gone to locate other survivors of the cataclysm,” said the remaining X. “This one will remain to instruct you in what you have doubtless so long desired to know. I fear, however, that you will find that you were happier when ignorant.”

  Again, Cull was startled. Someone touched him, and he turned so swiftly and flung his hands up so violently that he would have propelled himself helplessly above the machines. But Phyllis’ hand grabbed his wrist, and she pulled him back to the shelf to which she was clinging.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. “I heard everything. All of a sudden, I felt very much alone all by myself. I had to be near you. I’m so frightened.”

  He breathed deeply several times and then he recovered. And he felt love and compassion for her flood through him and out to her. They were two pitifully small and helpless beings who needed each other as much as any two in all the universe had ever needed.

  He turned to the beautiful and intelligent-looking automaton, and he spoke very boldly, knowing that he had to do so to keep his terror hidden from the speaker and far away from himself.

  He said, “Why have you dared to do this to us? To treat us as if we were automatons like X? You spoke of the soul a moment ago. You said that sentient beings had one. If so, Phyllis has a soul. I have one. So, why did you place us here without our permission or without even bothering to tell us why? Why?”

  “It had to be that way,” said the X. “As for souls, there are no such things. Not naturally. Beings are born; they live; they die. That is their end forever. Or it would be if it were not for us.

  “I’ll try to make this short but clear. I won’t answer all your questions. If I did, I’d be here from now until halfway into eternity. It’s enough for me, and will have to be for you, when I say that my people originated on a planet in a Galaxy thrice removed in time from this one. Three times. Our Galaxy died and was disintegrated and a new Galaxy was born from the ashes of the old one. And the second died, and a third was born.

  “My planet gave birth to a sentient species, my people, about 50 billion of your years ago. It was not until we had had a civilization for about 10,000 of your years, however, that we had a technology advanced enough to devise an artificial soul, a scientific method of ensuring immortality.

  “It is a terrible thing to contemplate that many billions of my people died and were lost forever in the annals of eternity before we discovered the synthetic soul. It does not seem fair, but this is not a fair universe. Besides, we have not given up hope of some day giving these lost ones souls. There are certain means… but I will not go into these.

  “We are what you would call highly ethical beings. We are not just interested in our own kind and its preservation. We love life and its products; we hold life sacred. This, in a universe that seems to breed and kill billions upon billions upon billions as if beings were a mere by-product of some cosmic process…

  “Having discovered the means to do so, we determined that every sentient being throughout the universe… yes, and even the pets among our animals… and a number of representatives of every species on every world… should have souls. These specimens of the so-called lower animals include every species: worms, sharks, amoebae, flies, elephants… but I digress, I promised to stick to the point.”

  Cull looked up at Fyodor and wished that he would regain consciousness. The little man had wanted so much to know, he had such faith in the supernatural, in his X. And then Cull thought that it was better this way. For Fyodor would not receive the final word in the form for which he had hoped so devoutly. To find that his beloved X was only a brainless artifice of flesh and metal, that would be too much.

  “Soul is the term I use,” said the X. “But, what is this soul? Is it a particle? A wave? It is not electromagnetic but a form of energy your kind does not even as yet suspect. When they do, they, too, will be able to invent the soul, but their work will be only duplicating ours and will be useless.

  “We’ll call the soul a quantum. And the devices which originate and transmit them, quantum-generators. We built these generators, made them indestructible and planted them in many locations in the universe so that, even if some were destroyed by means of which we cannot conceive, others would continue to do their work.

  “These generators continuously transmit the soul-quanta, which are not bound by the speed of light but pass around the universe in less than one Earthly hour. They fill the universe, so that no sentient being can be born and not encounter one at the appropriate time.

  “Each quantum contains a built-in factor which makes it ‘hook’ into a newly formed sentient, a baby yet in the womb. It stops at once when it encounters the neural pattern of this sentient and remains with the sentient as long as it lives.

  “And, once it ‘hooks’ itself to the flesh, no other soul-quantum can enter. Theoretically, at least, though it may happen that more than one does enter, thus accounting for certain types of schizophrenia.

  “Once attached to the body, the quantum immediately begins to record everything about the individual. The constantly shifting molecules of the cells, the electrochemical energy changes, nerve messages, everything. And, as it records, it stores the recordings temporarily, then discharges these for new ones. It does this until the body suffers a physical death and irreversible decomposition sets in.

  “The final recording is the one stored permanently in the quantum. Decomposition releases the quantum. Full of recordings of the physical being that once lived, it races again through the universe. And, eventu
ally, it is detected by our soul-receivers and captured. Once caught, its recordings are ‘played’ into a receptacle like one of those black discs you inserted into the recreation machine.

  “The soul, to all effects, is now the individual as he was at the moment of his death, containing all the individual contained.

  “When we so wish, we can insert the disc into a — what would you call it? — a resurrection machine. This reproduces the protoplasm of the body, and all that the body was, from the data in the disc.

  “Thus, you see, there is life after death. And it is not done through supernatural means, such as primitives hope for, but through the science of sentients.”

  Cull and Phyllis were silent for a long time. Then, Cull, haltingly, as if he had been stunned, said, “But… I am not resurrected. Not the real I… me… This thing that I am, it’s just a recording embodied in a shape that looked as I once did. It’s not me…”

  “You are wrong,” said the X. “The soul-quantum is as much you as the skin which was torn and grows again. It is more than an excrescence which is only temporarily attached to you. Would you say that a supernaturally endowed soul, slipped into your body, is not you? Then, why say that a scientifically endowed soul is not? Would you, if you had been knocked unconscious, say that you, on regaining consciousness, were not the same individual? The soul is you; it continues as you; the death of your body is only a temporary state; a sleep. Passage from a physical body to a physically unperceivable condition and back to a physical body is merely changing one state for another. The you remains.”

  Cull was silent for a few seconds. There were so many questions, and he did not know which to voice first. Phyllis spoke for him. In a high-pitched and trembling voice, she said, “What is happening now? Why are we being destroyed, I mean, why the earthquakes, the cataclysm, the… the killing of all of us? Why…”

  “Because…”

  The X stopped, and he turned his head slightly sidewise to look up at the entrance above the stairway. Cull looked also; he saw a demon floating in the doorway. He had a scarlet skin and four thin spiraling horns projecting from the top of a hairless head. Instead of arms, he had two long batlike wings. A tail also projected from his buttocks; it seemed to be two vanes of leather supported by two rays of cartilage radiating from his buttocks.