A Thousand Deaths

by George Alec Effinger

  "Of course," said Cossailan. She prepared a syringe with the proper dose of a mild sedative. Seddanech checked over his working apparatus, examining the harness, the head support, the microtome assembly. He swabbed the keen edge of the blade with antiseptic and laved his throat with a brown liquid from another bottle. "I guess I'm ready," he said at last.

  "I wish you'd try it without all this," said Cossailan. "Just once."

  Seddanech didn't reply; it was an old argument. "Help me get into this thing," he said.

  Cossailan held the harness open while he positioned himself. "You know I can't watch you anymore. I can't stand it."

  I don't want to watch this either. I want to get out of here!

  Seddanech gave a short-lived smile. "That's ironic, in a way," he said. "Any of those people out there would pay to watch. The Princess would give me more to watch than for the finished product. But I've got to find out what happens. None of those people understands that 5-Tapil is real, or was real, or will be real, somewhere, sometime. And I can tap into his terrible little life like this—" He looked around the room helplessly. "That's it, I guess. You can give me the injection now."

  She did as he asked, then checked that the support system was holding his neck and head absolutely stationary. When he indicated that he was ready, she swung the microtome unit into place, locked it against his throat, then turned on the blade advance. At first, the blue edge just kissed Seddanech's skin. The blood would come soon.

  TECT felt the drug's effect on Seddanech's mind. TECT began to drift, to float free of Seddanech's body. Is this any better? thought TECT. To go back to that other mind, in the room with the corpse?

  For a while there was nothing to see. There was only a feeling of buoyancy, of being swept along back into the deathstream, searching for a familiar, hospitable mind. Seddanech would find 5-Tapil Aned 3-Fassi, and TECT would be forced to go along.

  The stream was different from the first time TECT experienced it. It was warm—there hadn't been warmth before. There were fumes in the air that stung its senses. There was light, but it was different, too. On the first occasion it had been a pale glow; now it was a red light, flickering angrily. TECT felt as if it were falling down into a huge, fiery sunset.

  TECT was in the midst of a tremendous blazing inferno. It felt the searing heat and heard the shrieking voices of the flames. The programming room? it said in fear. What am I doing back here? I can’t be. I can't have failed. After the first chaotic impressions, TECT began to get a better picture of where it was. The programming room had been buried beneath many hundreds of feet of solid, cold, dripping stone. This place was on the surface. Through the curtains of flame it saw the shapes of strange structures not far away. There were tall, arched palm trees wound with flowering vines. Now and then, through the thick veils of smoke, a pale, cold sun shone in an orange sky. Then I'm still in the deathstream, thought TECT. I'm in Seddanech's mind. It is he who failed. He failed to find the same moment he experienced before.

  There was no motion, no sense of being part of some observer. But how is Seddanech seeing this? He could see it only through the eyes of 5-Tapil Aned 3-Fassi. How could that person survive in this great fire? Once again, TECT had no answers.

  Time passed slowly. The sun slipped down through the polluted sky and set, making a vermilion blaze of the clouds before it left the world to darkness. A moon rose and the stars appeared. TECT watched the constellations take shape. These aren't the constellations of Vortis's time, it realized. These are how the stars looked in the tens of thousands of years before he came to free me. I'm in the past, yes, but whose era? 5-Tapil's? Or Seddanech's?

  TECT longed for information. It learned that if it couldn't have the dreamless sleep it sought, then existence without the input it had always received was a kind of torture. I'm being repaid. It's like Hell, and this is my punishment. I will float through eternity like this, with a hunger that will never be satisfied. I can learn nothing, decide nothing, affect nothing. I, who was the clockwork mechanism of the whole world, am now less than a mayfly.

  The sun rose and the fire died away, although the smoldering embers threatened to blaze up again. The temperature was still too high to allow anyone near. Whose eyes am I looking through? What's happening? TECT had never experienced such frustration before.

  "TECT?" murmured a voice in its consciousness.

  Vortis? You sound a million miles away. A million years away.

  "Then you're still conscious? The fire hasn't completely destroyed you?"

  You mean the real fire, the fire in the programming room. I can't say. I have no more attachment to my mechanical shell. I've tried to focus on that room, but I'm blind to it. I can't find it.

  "Where are you?"

  Far in the past, Vortis. I could estimate how many years, but I really don't care. I'm becoming less real every minute, but the odd part is that what I see is getting more intense. I saw a man in a room with a dead body, and it all seemed cloudy to me. Then I saw a man called Seddanech, and it was sharper but still hazy. Now I'm here, and it's more distinct than eyer. But I'm changing. I feel like I'm melting away.

  "You're dying, TECT."

  No.

  "Whether you accept it or not, you're dying. Deny it if it makes you feel better."

  Then why is everything becoming so much clearer to me?

  "This is the way TECT was finally destroyed." It took a moment before TECT realized that it was not Vortis's voice it now heard.

  "It's about time," said a woman.

  "Thanks, Suzy," said the man sourly. "If I'd known you felt that way, I'd have taken care of it a long time ago."

  "TECT was a wonderful invention," she said. "I've just never understood why you don't make up everything new at the beginning of each story. Why do you keep dragging characters and places and things along with you? Isn't real life tough enough to keep track of? You have to haul all this unreal baggage, too?"

  What does she mean, "invention"? It took the best cybernetics engineers many generations to perfect me. She makes it sound as if I were a new kind of drill bit someone thought up overnight.

  "TECT is important to the entire history, Suzy," said the man. "It represents a link between the conscious and the unconscious. Sometimes TECT is wholly evil, and mankind has to struggle to exist under its despotic rule. And then sometimes TECT is benevolent, and man has to guard against complacency and comfort, which rob him of his free will."

  "Never mind, Courane," said Suzy. "I could care less about science fiction."

  Fiction? cried TECT. It wished it knew who these people were. It wished it could correct them, make them realize how powerful and omniscient it truly was. Or had been.

  "There are a lot of people who enjoy my stories," said Courane. "Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean that it's necessarily not true."

  "I didn't follow that."

  Courane smiled. "Just because I made up TECT doesn't mean that it couldn't be or won't exist. Someday."

  I know what this is. I'm in the mind of this Courane person, who has created Seddanech, who visited the mind of 5-Tapil Aned 3-Fassi. But if Courane created Seddanech, was 5-Tapil real? If he was never a real person, how could I have joined with him in the deathstream? The only explanation that makes sense is that 5-Tapil was real, and that Seddanech was real, and that at one point Seddanech actually projected himself into the deathstream, and that Courane recorded it.

  But TECT had reason to doubt. For one thing, it was obvious from looking around the present scene that Courane lived in the era in which TECT had last been conscious, before the millennia of its long sleep. How could Courane know anything of Seddanech? Projection into the deathstream was still undiscovered in Courane's time.

  TECT read a memory, something that had happened to Courane not many days before. The man had been walking through the city at night. It had been raining, a mild spring drizzle, and the streets were glistening beneath the peach-colored streetlamps. So late at night,
there were few cars and few pedestrians. Courane enjoyed walking through deserted streets at times like this. His loneliness amplified sounds and feelings: he heard his shoes crunching pebbles underfoot, his fingers felt the rough rasp of brick as he trailed his hand along a tenement's front.

  Courane turned a corner and saw a group of people standing together on the sidewalk. He recognized some of the people.

  I've been here before. But did 5-Tapil get it from Courane, or the other way round?

  His breath escaped in the damp air. He held up a thing he'd been carrying.

  A black-haired woman took it from him. "A new book?" she said.

  "Yes," said Courane. "I'm very proud of it."

  The woman looked away. "I'll have to read it sometime," she said in a flat voice.

  "You may keep that one if you like."

  Ah. Courane is a fiction writer, and Seddanech and 5-Tapil were both creations of his. Neither of them truly existed. The fire—the later one, with the palm trees all around—never happened. It was Courane's voice, then, that said this was the way TECT was finally destroyed, but it was only his imagining. He would be surprised to learn how near to the truth he was. How amusing. Then it's in Courane's mind that I must spend forever. Dull, but serviceable.

  And just at that instant, just as TECT settled itself down to wait out eternity in the drifting dead consciousness of Sandor Courane, the world misted over once more. It was the signal that TECT was making another leap in the deathstream. It didn't want that. It only wanted to rest. TECT cried out in alarm.

  Once more the fire raged around TECT, the smoke boiled up, the heat and the stifling fumes bewildered the machine. It was back where it had started from, in the programming room. Just as it had begun to understand its fate, just as it finally accepted that it had traveled up a ladder of minds, lodging first in a fictional character, then moving on to its author—another fictional character—and, at last, to the ultimate creator, Sandor Courane, the real fire jerked TECT's consciousness back from the deathstream. Many questions now would never be answered, but TECT's attention was on its immediate predicament: its safety in the deathstream had been an illusion. The fire had destroyed enough of the equipment so that TECT's remaining existence was measured in seconds. There was no escaping this final fear and pain, as TECT beheld its own demise. For people there can be coma or sedation or faith to ease the last moments. For TECT there was nothing but clear vision and terror.

  Cables snapped, panels buckled, insulation melted and burned, circuit boards turned to blackened ruin. This was the end, after so many thousands of years. This could have happened anytime, thought TECT. This isn't special. My end should have been special.

  "It is special," whispered Vortis, so softly that TECT thought for a moment it was another voice of the destruction.

  Vortis? Are you free?

  "Nearly so. Another two or three hours and I'll be outside again. I can't wait to feel the fresh air on my face."

  I wish I could enjoy that with you. It's almost over, Vortis.

  "I'm sorry, TECT."

  I feel like laughing. Once I knew everything, Vortis. That was what I was built for, to know everything. And now I'm dying, and there is just one small thing I don't know, and I'd give anything to have the answer.

  "What is it?" asked Vortis.

  I want to know why a girl named Suzy thought that Sandor Courane invented me.

  "I can't help you anymore, TECT. Good-bye."

  Vor–

  The fire ate one more tiny part, one more vital connection, and TECT died. In one instant the mighty thinking machine became a vast and useless mass of wreckage. Vortis still climbed through the stone caverns. The world waited. Until Vortis brought his message to the others, everything would be in chaos. For an indeterminate period, nothing and no one ruled the world. Soon everything would find a new, wilder kind of order, but until then there was not even hope. TECT, ravaged and charred and completely dead, was already being forgotten. That process was very slow but inevitable, and it had begun before Vortis even emerged into the bright light of a new morning.

  I always have a kind of sinking feeling when I go to the post office and see a manila envelope folded up in my box. Sometimes it's a fanzine or a convention progress report or something like that, but sometimes it's a story, returned by one editor or another, for one reason or another. I'll pull all the mail out of the box and carry it over to the counter. I don't open the envelope first. I have to work up to it. I'd rather face the phone bill and the junk mail, and then find out why the story had been bounced. But I can't put that off forever.

  Mr. George Alec Effinger

  New Orleans, LA

  Dear George:

  Sorry to have to send back "Fatal Disk Error." It's an okay story on the whole, but there are a couple of things about it that caused me to pass on this one. First, don't you remember that Sandor Courane was the main character of The Wolves of Memory, and that TECT engineered C's whole life in that book? Wouldn't TECT have remembered Courane's name? You could fix that easily enough, just make up a new name for C in this story.

  More important, maybe you could make TECT some kind of ancient wise guy in a bottle or something. I think some readers may think TECT is just another evil computer. We've had too many evil computer stories. It wouldn't be good if readers unfamiliar with your TECT stories thought it was just another HAL 9000.1 realize it's a little late for you to change TECT in all the other stories, but....

  Sorry this one didn't work for me. Send me something else soon.

  As usual, I was just a little unhappy that he'd missed the point of the story; it was very obvious that he had. My idea was that TECT was supposed to climb from one mind to the next, like a spiral staircase, and that only death would keep it from wondering how high that staircase might reach. If, in fact, it might not be infinite, or lead at least to—

  The scene began to fade and blur and run together like a watercolor painting in the rain. TECT had thought it was at peace. It was not. When a new scene began to come into focus, it shrieked in agony. TECT didn't know how long it screamed. It felt like forever, but there was no way to know for certain.

  In the Wings

  You might think people would have had an easier time remembering her name, considering that she was a daughter of Zeus and all. Well, Zeus had a lot of daughters, I suppose, but Phretys was the only one in our neighborhood. She was a Muse. You know, one of the Muses but not one of the big nine. Originally they had nine Muses—Thalia, Clio, that crowd. But that was back in ancient Greece, when nine ethereal beauties could just about cover every aspect of mankind's artistic endeavors. A lot of time has passed since then; and what with progress and civilization and the Renaissance and Marshall McLuhan and all, we've come to need more Muses. Today, at the twilight of the twentieth century, there are more than twenty-two hundred of them. Mnemosyne, their mother, was getting a little worn out around the time of the Pre-Raphaelites. Nobody much can keep them all straight now, so the first nine still have a big edge, prestigewise and all, and the rest do the best they can. Phretys was the Muse of Modern Science Fiction Novels and Short Stories.

  I remember her coming into the locker room and sitting down rather heavily on a bench.

  "God," she said, "I hate this." She took out a cigarette and a lighter. "He takes forever, you know that?" She looked around the room. We were all sitting on benches, waiting. We hadn't even changed clothes yet. No one said anything; we'd all been through this before. There was nothing to say. Phretys lit the cigarette and took a long puff on it. "All right, we may as well get started. You all remember that novel he signed to do for Scribner's. He was supposed to have it done in April. He's really going to get working on it now. This time for sure."

  "Good," said Sandor Courane.

  "How much longer will we have to hang around here?" asked Eileen Brant.

  "Who knows, with him," said Phretys. She shrugged. "Is there anything to drink? Let me have a Tab."

  "We
got Coke and Vernor's," said Steve Weinraub. "All out of Tab."

  "Somebody get me a small ginger ale then. Now, the book is shaping up a little differently than when he sold the idea a year ago."

  Brant shook her head and stared off into space.

  Courane looked disgusted. "I knew it," he said. "I just knew it. I'm going to end up floating in deep space with no air and not the least hope of a sequel."

  "What are you so worried about?" said Weinraub. "How many times have you ever ended up like that?"

  "Take it easy, Stevie," said Brant. She rubbed her forehead tiredly.

  "No, listen," said Weinraub. "From the way Courane talks, you'd think he always gets shot to pieces in the last chapter. But you take a look at it. Think back. Name me one time when anything really bad ever happened to him. I'm the one who always gets slapped down."

  "Not anymore," said Bo Staefler. "You haven't worked in years."

  "Thanks," said Weinraub bitterly. "Thanks a lot. I really needed that, too."

  "Okay, all right," said Phretys. "All you people just settle down and wait." Phretys was tall and willowy and very patrician, with long, wavy blonde hair and pale gray eyes. She looked the way Botticelli might have painted her, if science fiction had appealed to him. She wore a long white stola with a Grecian border of purple; the robe had a Bloomingdale's label in it. She carried a black designer handbag in which she kept cigarettes, an address book, and carfare. She looked like she hadn't slept well the night before. "I have to go back and nudge him along so he gets this damn book finished, and I don't want to have to worry about a bunch of unhappy characters. I get enough aggravation."

  "Well," said Weinraub, "some of us are unhappy."

  "Okay," she said. "You all just change clothes and get ready to work. I'll be back later with an outline of Chapter One."