In the next days he took over several routine jobs, unasked. He undertook nothing that wanted initiative, and if asked to do anything he made no response at all.
“He’s doing well,” Pugh said in the dialect of Argentina.
“He’s not. He’s turning himself into a machine. Does what he’s programmed to do, no reaction to anything else. He’s worse off than when he didn’t function at all. He’s not human any more.”
Pugh sighed. “Well, good night,” he said in English. “Good night, Kaph.”
“Good night,” Martin said; Kaph did not.
Next morning at breakfast Kaph reached across Martin’s plate for the toast. “Why don’t you ask for it?” Martin said with the geniality of repressed exasperation. “I can pass it.”
“I can reach it,” Kaph said in his flat voice.
“Yes, but look. Asking to pass things, saying good night or hello, they’re not important, but all the same when somebody says something a person ought to answer…”
The young man looked indifferently in Martin’s direction; his eyes still did not seem to see clear through to the person he looked toward. “Why should I answer?”
“Because somebody has said something to you.”
“Why?”
Martin shrugged and laughed. Pugh jumped up and turned on the rock-cutter.
Later on he said, “Lay off that, please, Martin.”
“Manners are essential in small isolated crews, some kind of manners, whatever you work out together. He’s been taught that, everybody in Far Out knows it. Why does he deliberately flout it?”
“Do you tell yourself good night?”
“So?”
“Don’t you see Kaph’s never known anyone but himself?”
Martin brooded and then broke out. “Then by God this cloning business is all wrong. It won’t do. What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don’t even know we exist?”
Pugh nodded. “It might be wiser to separate the clones and bring them up with others. But they make such a grand team this way.”
“Do they? I don’t know. If this lot had been ten average inefficient E.T. engineers, would they all have got killed? What if, when the quake came and things started caving in, what if all those kids ran the same way, farther into the mine, maybe, to save the one who was farthest in? Even Kaph was outside and went in…It’s hypothetical. But I keep thinking, out of ten ordinary confused guys, more might have got out.”
“I don’t know. It’s true that identical twins tend to die at about the same time, even when they have never seen each other. Identity and death, it is very strange…”
The days went on, the red sun crawled across the dark sky, Kaph did not speak when spoken to, Pugh and Martin snapped at each other more frequently each day. Pugh complained of Martin’s snoring. Offended, Martin moved his cot clear across the dome and also ceased speaking to Pugh for some while. Pugh whistled Welsh dirges until Martin complained, and then Pugh stopped speaking for a while.
The day before the Mission ship was due, Martin announced he was going over to Merioneth.
“I thought at least you’d be giving me a hand with the computer to finish the rock analyses,” Pugh said, aggrieved.
“Kaph can do that. I want one more look at the Trench. Have fun,” Martin added in dialect, and laughed, and left.
“What is that language?”
“Argentinean. I told you that once, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know.” After a while the young man added, “I have forgotten a lot of things, I think.”
“It wasn’t important, to be sure,” Pugh said gently, realizing all at once how important this conversation was. “Will you give me a hand running the computer, Kaph?”
He nodded.
Pugh had left a lot of loose ends, and the job took them all day. Kaph was a good coworker, quick and systematic, much more so than Pugh himself. His flat voice, now that he was talking again, got on the nerves; but it didn’t matter, there was only this one day left to get through and then the ship would come, the old crew, comrades and friends.
During tea break Kaph said, “What will happen if the Explore ship crashes?”
“They’d be killed.”
“To you, I mean.”
“To us? We’d radio SOS signals and live on half rations till the rescue cruiser from Area Three Base came. Four and a half E-years away it is. We have life support here for three men for, let’s see, maybe between four and five years. A bit tight, it would be.”
“Would they send a cruiser for three men?”
“They would.”
Kaph said no more.
“Enough cheerful speculations,” Pugh said cheerfully, rising to get back to work. He slipped sideways and the chair avoided his hand; he did a sort of half-pirouette and fetched up hard against the dome hide. “My goodness,” he said, reverting to his native idiom, “what is it?”
“Quake,” said Kaph.
The teacups bounced on the table with a plastic cackle, a litter of papers slid off a box, the skin of the dome swelled and sagged. Underfoot there was a huge noise, half sound, half shaking, a subsonic boom.
Kaph sat unmoved. An earthquake does not frighten a man who died in an earthquake.
Pugh, white-faced, wiry black hair sticking out, a frightened man, said, “Martin is in the Trench.”
“What trench?”
“The big fault line. The epicenter for the local quakes. Look at the seismograph.” Pugh struggled with the stuck door of a still-jittering locker.
“Where are you going?”
“After him.”
“Martin took the jet. Sleds aren’t safe to use during quakes. They go out of control.”
“For God’s sake man, shut up.”
Kaph stood up, speaking in a flat voice as usual. “It’s unnecessary to go out after him now. It’s taking an unnecessary risk.”
“If his alarm goes off, radio me,” Pugh said, shut the head-piece of his suit, and ran to the lock. As he went out Libra picked up her ragged skirts and danced a belly dance from under his feet clear to the red horizon.
Inside the dome, Kaph saw the sled go up, tremble like a meteor in the dull red daylight, and vanish to the northeast. The hide of the dome quivered, the earth coughed. A vent south of the dome belched up a slow-flowing bile of black gas.
A bell shrilled and a red light flashed on the central control board. The sign under the light read Suit 2 and scribbled under that, A.G.M. Kaph did not turn the signal off. He tried to radio Martin, then Pugh, but got no reply from either.
When the aftershocks decreased he went back to work and finished up Pugh’s job. It took him about two hours. Every half hour he tried to contact Suit 1 and got no reply, then Suit 2 and got no reply. The red light had stopped flashing after an hour.
It was dinnertime. Kaph cooked dinner for one and ate it. He lay down on his cot.
The aftershocks had ceased except for faint rolling tremors at long intervals. The sun hung in the west, oblate, pale red, immense. It did not sink visibly. There was no sound at all.
Kaph got up and began to walk about the messy, half-packed-up, overcrowded, empty dome. The silence continued. He went to the player and put on the first tape that came to hand. It was pure music, electronic, without harmonies, without voices. It ended. The silence continued.
Pugh’s uniform tunic, one button missing, hung over a stack of rock samples. Kaph stared at it a while.
The silence continued.
The child’s dream: There is no one else alive in the world but me. In all the world.
Low, north of the dome, a meteor flickered.
Kaph’s mouth opened as if he were trying to say something, but no sound came. He went hastily to the north wall and peered out into the gelatinous red light.
The little star came in and sank. Two figures blurred the airlock. Kaph stood close beside the lock as they came in. Martin’s imsuit was covered with some kind of dust so that he looked r
addled and warty like the surface of Libra. Pugh had him by the arm.
“Is he hurt?”
Pugh shucked his suit, helped Martin peel off his. “Shaken up,” he said, curt.
“A piece of cliff fell onto the jet,” Martin said, sitting down at the table and waving his arms. “Not while I was in it though. I was parked, see, and poking about that carbon-dust area when I felt things humping. So I went out onto a nice bit of early igneous I’d noticed from above, good footing and out from under the cliffs. Then I saw this bit of the planet fall off onto the flyer, quite a sight it was, and after a while it occurred to me the spare aircans were in the flyer, so I leaned on the panic button. But I didn’t get any radio reception, that’s always happening here during quakes, so I didn’t know if the signal was getting through either. And things went on jumping around and pieces of the cliff coming off. Little rocks flying around, and so dusty you couldn’t see a meter ahead. I was really beginning to wonder what I’d do for breathing in the small hours, you know, when I saw old Owen buzzing up the Trench in all that dust and junk like a big ugly bat—”
“Want to eat?” said Pugh.
“Of course I want to eat. How’d you come through the quake here, Kaph? No damage? It wasn’t a big one actually, was it, what’s the seismo say? My trouble was I was in the middle of it. Old Epicenter Alvaro. Felt like Richter fifteen there—total destruction of planet—”
“Sit down,” Pugh said. “Eat.”
After Martin had eaten a little his spate of talk ran dry. He very soon went off to his cot, still in the remote angle where he had removed it when Pugh complained of his snoring. “Good night, you one-lunged Welshman,” he said across the dome.
“Good night.”
There was no more out of Martin. Pugh opaqued the dome, turned the lamp down to a yellow glow less than a candle’s light, and sat doing nothing, saying nothing, withdrawn.
The silence continued.
“I finished the computations.”
Pugh nodded thanks.
“The signal from Martin came through, but I couldn’t contact you or him.”
Pugh said with effort, “I should not have gone. He had two hours of air left even with only one can. He might have been heading home when I left. This way we were all out of touch with one another. I was scared.”
The silence came back, punctuated now by Martin’s long, soft snores.
“Do you love Martin?”
Pugh looked up with angry eyes: “Martin is my friend. We’ve worked together, he’s a good man.” He stopped. After a while he said, “Yes, I love him. Why did you ask that?”
Kaph said nothing, but he looked at the other man. His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before; his voice too was changed. “How can you…How do you…”
But Pugh could not tell him. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s practice, partly. I don’t know. We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
Kaph’s strange gaze dropped, burned out by its own intensity.
“I’m tired,” Pugh said. “That was ugly, looking for him in all that black dust and muck, and mouths opening and shutting in the ground…I’m going to bed. The ship will be transmitting to us by six or so.” He stood up and stretched.
“It’s a clone,” Kaph said. “The other Exploit Team they’re bringing with them.”
“Is it then?”
“A twelveclone. They came out with us on the Passerine.”
Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the absolute, closed self-sufficiency of the clone of twelve; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure. Pugh put a hand on his shoulder in passing. “The chief won’t ask you to stay here with a clone. You can go home. Or since you’re Far Out maybe you’ll come on farther out with us. We could use you. No hurry deciding. You’ll make out all right.”
Pugh’s quiet voice trailed off. He stood unbuttoning his coat, stooped a little with fatigue. Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.
“Good night,” Pugh mumbled, crawling into his sleeping bag and half asleep already, so that he did not hear Kaph reply after a pause, repeating, across darkness, benediction.
Mazes
I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing, in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult. When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight.
The alien’s cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat.
The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping, being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting, spatially disquieting, the strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognizable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature’s purpose was to achieve communication.
It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.
The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material much colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it. The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring, outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding, but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long, reimagining the lines and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in
its entirety.
It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatenation, where the “cloud” theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiraling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow-gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing, I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.
When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze—the short one, the maze for little children who have not yet learned how to talk.
Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance.
After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognizable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see somewhat as we do. It has a mouth, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate! The alien has never once attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally self-absorbed.
This would go far to explain its cruelty.
I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be communicating labially. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature’s perversity, I thought. I studied its lip-motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then went away.
The Unreal and the Real - Vol 2 - Outer Space, Inner Lands Page 7
