Gray Matters

by William Hjortsberg

  This is the worst punishment. Before the merge she never used her communicator; she had nothing to say to any resident of the subdistrict. But now Vera longs to find the tousle-haired sailorboy who saved her from drowning. She remembers his tanned body and gentle voice. The time they spent together in the drifting sloop seems happier than any episode from her first girlhood. The boy was so tender and kind. His smile haunts her like distant music. For the first time in centuries, Vera Mitlovic is in love.

  Obu Itubi navigates the Amco-pak beyond the outer limits of the subdistrict, down unknown corridors and labyrinthine passageways. Everywhere the burnished gun-metal walls glow with the luster of recent cleaning. The floors are immaculately waxed and polished. The scanner lens adjusts to triple power, but no trace of dust or grime is revealed. Itubi can find nothing, not a single crumb or cobweb strand to indicate even the transient presence of organic life.

  After endless hours traveling through silence, the Amco-pak’s auditory system picks up a distant noise. Itubi follows this clue like an owl homing in on the faint rustling of a mouse. Any new development will be welcome, even combat with another maintenance van is preferable to treading eternally down deserted corridors. The sound grows louder, a smooth, machined humming. Turning a final corner, Itubi confronts the source: a spiral conveyor ramp in perpetual motion. It threads upward from some mysterious level deep beneath the polished floor and continues on through the luminous ceiling like the interior of a mechanized snail’s shell.

  Itubi wastes no time maneuvering the Amco-pak aboard; his power supply is critical and any opportunity for conservation is welcome. With the stateliness of an ascending angel, he spirals up through the ceiling, triumph and hope resonant beneath the shining surface of his stainless steel armor.

  Itubi remains on the ramp as it carries him past level after level. He sees nothing that would encourage him to get off. Each new plateau seems exactly like the subdistrict he left behind: the same shining floors and metallic walls, the identical egg-crate ceilings. He might as well be standing still.

  Without warning Itubi is disgorged onto a rotating platform in the center of a vast dome-covered arena. As the Amco-pak turns slowly on the revolving disk, Itubi studies his new surroundings. The dome above is transparent and the astonished cerebromorph thrills to the nearly forgotten sight of clouds and sky. At measured intervals around the wall enclosing the arena, large open doorways stand waiting.

  Itubi rumbles off the turntable, urging the Amco-pak across the arena at top speed. But before he can reach the nearest doorway, a warning buzzer sounds and a solid steel portcullis slides securely into place. All around the arena his scanner shows every doorway firmly sealed.

  Itubi is undeterred. He pulls to a stop in front of the armored door and sets to work. The Amco-pak is a mobile workshop, equipped with diamond-tip drills, high-frequency sound torches, and an all-purpose laser. In minutes the maintenance van has burned an opening through solid steel.

  Itubi works at this aperture, widening the gap until he carves a space broad enough to permit the passage of the Amco-pak. Beyond the steel door is a long low-ceilinged chamber and, once inside, Itubi makes an incredible discovery. Arranged along each wall stands a series of large transparent cylinders, all glowing with radiant artificial sunlight. Housed within each of these tubular caskets, as perfectly formed as Adam or Eve, is the naked body of an adult human.

  3. Imago

  THE NEWS TRAVELS FROM deposit drawer to deposit drawer with electronic immediacy. Many residents of Aisle B have been scanning the emergency decantation and the gossip starts with the unexplained suddenness of the Amco-pak’s departure. Communication channels are jammed as word of the runaway spreads; descriptions of the battle between the maintenance vans from outer-edge residents only fan the flames of curiosity.

  A new hero is born. The legend of escape begins to germinate. So many residents request Obu Itubi’s files that the memory-file librarian is forced to remove his file number from the Index. The African Renaissance, a school held in disrepute since the Awakening because of its overt fetishism, is once again of interest to the scholars. Even Itubi’s Auditor is working overtime, screening and rescreening his subject’s files in a search for the clue he knows he will eventually find, some undiscovered quirk or weakness which Center Control can use to bait its trap.

  Skeets Kalbfleischer listens to the delicate ping-pong music of a million distant circuits opening and closing. The warning tone of a deHartzman Communicator caught him dreaming of Vera and he concentrates on the fragile electronic sound, the Pure White Light of spirituality being unavailable. All prurient thought must be eliminated, the mind left pure and clean in the advent of his Auditor. How to behave in the face of authority is the first lesson learned in the sixth grade.

  BEEP…

  All greetings, A-0001, I trust the additional meditation time has been fruitful?

  Well, it’s shown me many things …

  Continued meditation is the key to Understanding.

  Experience is also a great teacher.

  So it is, A-0001, and the lesson is one of Illusion. Memory-merge is a useful tool because it demonstrates that reality is only a shadow. It must have been enlightening when you discovered yourself back in the Depository?

  Frightening.

  Really? In what way? I was hoping you would be prepared to file a complete report, but your reactions are confusing. I anticipated ecstasy and not fear.

  The merge was certainly ecstatic; it was returning that was unpleasant.

  Why?

  The only conclusion I’ve come to is that the experience, which I must tell you I thoroughly enjoyed, was unsatisfactory because it was incomplete. I suppose an analogy from the Old Life would be the difference between a mature relationship and merely visiting a brothel.

  Are you suggesting the need for additional merge time!

  Well, I wouldn’t feel prepared to file a full report unless the experience were complete.

  Even if it were to take years?

  Even so.

  And suppose years weren’t available to you, would you be prepared to gamble?

  I don’t know what you mean. Please explain.

  The induced memory-merge draws upon the actual experience of the residents involved; the length of merge time depends upon the reservoir of memory stored in your mind. You can’t draw on what is not there. Your mate had quite a healthy lifespan as a biped; she could sustain a lengthy merge. But you, A-0001, have only twelve years of memory on file before craniotomy; your experiences would unreel backwards toward infancy; your perceptions would grow increasingly childish. It takes very little imagination to foresee the end of this unhappy relationship.

  I’m prepared to gamble.

  Are you?

  Or else abandon the entire project.

  Rash decisions are always unwise, A-0001. If you wish to resume the merge it will be arranged. The Commission desires only that you succeed in taking this step along the Path. But it is you who must make the step.

  Then I would like to resume as soon as it’s convenient.

  Very good. I will attend to the details immediately. May Wisdom guide you on this Path and lead you to Understanding. End transmission.

  CLICK.

  Itubi is aghast. The power center of his Amco-pak idles; his scanner lens widens; immobilized, he studies the nearly forgotten perfection of the human form. The bodies, alternately male and female, stand inert, relaxed. Their arms hang at their sides; their eyes are closed. The nostrils’ dilation and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest are the only indications of life.

  The discovery has deprived Itubi of his victory. What triumph he felt on escaping the subdistrict vanishes in the face of these sculpted fluid bodies. The Amco-pak, the vehicle of his salvation, now seems like a ponderous shell he is forced to carry. He squats inside, a wrinkled mollusc in his bath of sea water, a billion years of evolution separating him from these splendid creatures in the sunlit c
ylinders.

  Itubi knows that the low vaulted chamber is neither museum nor tomb. The bodies he sees are no pot-bellied slump-shouldered relics of the distant past, but erect well-muscled thoroughbreds, laboratory conceived and hatchery reared, genetically perfect, the chromosomes biochemically prearranged by a master of the art. Itubi recognizes the high cheekbones and coppery skin of the man encased in front of him. Once he had a similar body. It is a Tropique, one of the three humanoid life-forms created in the twenty-second century. The figure in the glowing glass case could easily be Itubi’s ghost.

  A bitter memory of the past stings at Obu Itubi’s consciousness. Again he is confronted by the specter of treachery and betrayal. The handsome male and female humanoids housed in this peculiar storage chamber recall happier times when the world was green and flowering, a cybernetic garden without disease or old age. Life had never known such abundance; mankind had reached an undreamed-of summit of culture and civilization. Peace and harmony pervaded the world. The inheritors of this Eden are on file in the multi-layered Depository beneath the plastic floor. Itubi stares out through the scanner, a stainless-steel crustacean peering at the form of God incarnate.

  His presence on the communicator comes like a shaft of sunlight into her dungeon, bringing hope and a glimpse of freedom. He promises seashells; a house built of driftwood and decorated with seashells. He can build such a house for he has many skills; his uniform is adorned with insignia attesting to his prowess. They will gather food from tide pools; he knows every edible species and how to prepare it. He is expert in the technique of survival. Even fire is no problem. He can start a fire with nothing more than a pair of sticks.

  How thrilled he is to learn she was once an actress. He wants to see all her films, but she makes him vow to screen only those made before she was fourteen. How terrifying for him to watch his true love age thirty years in the course of an afternoon’s entertainment: a lifetime distilled into a triple-feature. He is young and vulnerable, best for his dreams to remain untarnished. One thing she knows: the years between Vera at fourteen and Vera at forty-five are marred by considerable tarnish.

  Itubi nurtures his rage, letting it thrive and blossom, cultivating a red flowering anger that is exquisite and all-consuming. Confronted by the body stolen from him a hundred years before, the memories of that final flight to Abyssinia with his family and friends burn with renewed fervor. He remembers the choking dismay he felt on the Awakening, the day the World Council voted for universal cerebrectomy as a necessary evolutionary advance in mankind’s quest for spiritual knowledge. Itubi, who had always looked to his art for salvation, ignored the epidemic of religious fervor gripping the world and failed to report to the Surgical Center, spending the next five years hiding in mountain caves and dugouts until the robot Sentinels discovered him close to death near a poisoned waterhole. He regained consciousness in the sub-district, on the lowest level of the System.

  The perfection of the Tropique seems to mock the agony of what was lost in that fateful operation. They stole more than his life and body; the world ended on that day, a world so fine that its absence alone provides a definition of damnation. Itubi’s rage explodes in the face of this final indignity. He smashes the tubular glass casket with a sideswipe of his machine-tooled fist, reaching in for the Tropique with eager pneumatic fingers.

  Skeets clears his snorkle of sea water, spouting like a dolphin in the bay. He rolls on his back and studies the shore through his water-streaked face mask: the snowlike dazzle of the beach and the jagged line of hills, green as a hummingbird’s throat. When he was eight, his parents took him on a Caribbean cruise. For years afterward the ornate shells and bits of staghorn coral occupied a place of honor on his dresser, and the memory of swimming in the jewel-pure clarity of that incredible water haunted him like a recurring dream. He is grateful to his Auditor for uncovering this magic bit of the past.

  Vera, of course, lived for years in the Caribbean, but although she is reminded of Grenada, she is unable to identify their island. Skeets waves to her on the beach. He thinks of how she will smile when she sees the langouste he has speared. A few yards away, the Sand Dab III rides at anchor. This afternoon they will take her for a sail. Skeets can’t imagine life getting any finer.

  Languidly, Vera rubs her golden arms and legs with coconut oil. She watches Skeets swim in the emerald water, the black upthrust of his flippered feet as he dives. A pattern of crab tracks surrounds her in the sand; palm fronds ripple like sail canvas in the even breeze. She has never known such happiness; their island is more beautiful than anything imagined in the solitude of her cranial container. The shelter Skeets lashed together out of driftwood uprights and palm thatch is bordered with queen conch shells and bowered by bougainvillea and hibiscus, and tall stands of lethal oleander.

  Vera has lost all track of time. It doesn’t matter; memory-merge is like a dream. The passage of weeks and months may account for only a few hours in the Depository, so it’s futile to pay attention to time. Once, an Auditor instructed her to meditate on the nature of time. She remembers his lesson. Time is an abstraction devised by man to regulate the illusion he calls reality; the past, the present, and the future are happening Now; this very moment is all there is. Understanding each moment is the key to Liberation. Vera was never much good at her lessons, but as the days blend into weeks and the weeks into months, the deposit drawer seems another dimension away and the suntanned young actress decides that her Auditor was right about time after all.

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  ITUBI Itubi

  OBU Obu

  The sound of his own name echoing and re-echoing in the vaulted chamber is more arresting than an alarm signal, more alluring than the sweetest music:

  Obu Itubi …

  It has been over seventy-five years since he last heard his name pronounced. “Be careful, Obu,” his wife had whispered that fateful morning when he set out to find food for their renegade mountain band. “Don’t let anything happen to you, my own Obu. If you should fail to return I would be so alone. Isn’t it better that we all die together, not alone and afraid.” When she kissed him goodbye, her lips formed the shape of his name for the final time. He never saw her again. In the Depository he was called only by number: B-0489.

  The hidden loudspeaker continues to broadcast his name again and again as Itubi listens, entranced. The Tropique hangs from the Amco-pak’s steel grip like a chipmunk caught in the talons of a hawk. His anger subsides, the rage is calmed. Itubi switches on his own broadcast equipment and adjusts the voice-range control of his speech center.

  All right … I hear you … What? (Itubi is having some trouble with feedback interference and he fiddles with the controls of his eliminator.) … All right, I can hear you.

  OBU ITUBI. PLEASE RESUME COMMUNICATOR CONTACT WITH CENTER CONTROL.

  No. We can talk like this. I have no interest in letting you get inside my mind again.

  AS YOU WISH. WE UNDERSTAND YOUR OBVIOUS AGITATION..

  Do you?

  OF COURSE. RIGHT NOW YOU WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. YOUR ACTIONS ARE CONFUSED BECAUSE OF YOUR DISORIENTATION. MOST OF ALL, YOU ARE UPSET BY THE PRESENCE OF THE TROPIQUES. IS THAT NOT SO?

  You seem to know all about it.

  YOUR RAGE AND CONFUSION ARE THE PRODUCTS OF IGNORANCE. ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND WHERE YOU ARE, YOU WILL NO LONGER BE AFRAID.

  Tell me where I am then.

  LEVEL X OF THE DEPOSITORY SYSTEM, THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF ALL RESIDENTS. ONCE HAVING REACHED 360 DEGREES OF UNDERSTANDING, WHAT THE ANCIENTS CALLED ENLIGHTENMENT, A CEREBROMORPH IS DECANTED AND TRANSFERRED TO A HUMAN BODY. CENTER CONTROL MAINTAINS COMPLETE BREEDING AND HATCHERY INSTALLATIONS. AT THIS MOMENT, OBU ITUBI, YOU ARE INSIDE THE SUSPENDED ANIMATION FA
CILITY FOR THE TROPIQUE CLASS OF HUMANOID. THESE BODIES ARE SPECIMENS DEVELOPED SPECIALLY FOR CRANIAL TRANSFER. THEIR BRAINS ARE ONLY VESTIGAL EXTENSIONS OF THE SPINAL CORD. THOUGHT, MEMORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS ARE UNKNOWN TO THESE TROPIQUES UNTIL A LEVEL X RESIDENT HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED.

  And what happens then? Where does a resident go in his new body?

  BACK INTO THE WORLD, WHERE HE IS FREE TO LIVE AMONG HIS FELLOW ENLIGHTENED ONES, OR IN SOLITUDE, AS HE DESIRES, UNTIL A NATURAL DEATH OVERTAKES HIM AND HE BECOMES UNITED WITH ALL.

  Guided, of course, by the rules of the System and supervised by Center Control.

  CENTER CONTROL HAS NO AUTHORITY OVER LIBERATED RESIDENTS. THE FUNTION OF CENTER CONTROL IS TO GUIDE RESIDENTS TO ENLIGHTENMENT.

  What sort of world is left? An extension of the Depository?

  THE WORLD IS GREEN AND BEAUTIFUL STILL, OBU ITUBI, AND IT LIES JUST OUTSIDE THESE WALLS. ALL DEPOSITORIES ARE HOUSED UNDERGROUND. ONCE A RESIDENT HAS REACHED LEVEL X HE WILL NEVER SEE A DEPOSITORY AGAIN. HIS FREEDOM WILL BE COMPLETE.

  I want to be free.

  AND SO YOU SHALL BE, OBU ITUBI.

  Level I is a long way from Level X. I can’t wait that long.

  THERE ARE ALWAYS EXCEPTIONS TO THE SYSTEM. YOUR AUDITOR REPORTS THAT YOUR CREATIVE NATURE MAKES DEPOSITORY LIFE A LIABILITY FOR YOU. CENTER CONTROL DESIRES ONLY A RESIDENT’S SAFETY AND SPIRITUAL WELFARE. CONTENTMENT IS ESSENTIAL BEFORE PROGRESS CAN BE MADE. YOUR ESCAPE HAS VERYU MUCH IMPRESSED CENTER CONTROL, OBU ITUBI. IT WAS ASSUMED THAT A RESIDENT WOULD NEVER WISH TO ESCAPE. IN THE FACE OF YOUR ACTION, THE AUDITING COMMISSION HAS RECOMMENDED TRANSFERRAL TO A HUMAN BODY.

  Do you mean to set me free?

  THE WORLD AWAITS YOU.

  And will you give me a new body?

  YOU CAN HAVE THE ONE THE AMCO-PAK HOLDS IF YOU SO DESIRE.

  What must I do?

  THE PROCEDURE IS QUITE SIMPLE. THE FIRST STEP IS TO RECONNECT YOUR COMMUNICATOR HOOKUP AND RESUME CONTACT WITH CENTER CONTROL… .