Gray Matters

by William Hjortsberg

  Skiri’s answer is calm and deliberate. “We are the Guardians.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That is everything. The world is ours to preserve. We are the Guardians.”

  5. Larva

  WITH POWER BACK TO normal in the subdistrict and the period of emergency operations at an end, many Level I residents find they are no longer satisfied with life as it was. The possibility of actual danger has increased their expectations and the prospect of endless anticipatory days at the scanner appalls even the most dedicated viewer. For the first time in centuries, the comic clumsiness of that perennial favorite, the Amco-pak series, fails to draw an appreciable audience.

  As the ennui spreads, so does the legend of Obu Itubi. The official report of a malfunctioning Mark X is disregarded by all but the most gullible in the System. Those who scanned the flight are besieged with thousands of requests for details. One scanner witness has become famous because he thought to make a memo file of the battle between the maintenance vans. Copies are circulated throughout the subdistrict via communicator. Print quality is a good indication of one’s social standing; each retransmission blurs the image. Those without status must be satisfied with grainy files resembling twentieth-century color TV reception. There is a certain irony in that many of these same residents spent much of their time on their backsides guzzling beer in front of the flickering tube back in the days when there still were backsides and beer, and gullets to guzzle it with.

  The beach is less than a hundred meters long, a pink parabola of coral sand protected at either end by jagged rock walls. Black and moon-pocked with sharp-edged craters where Triassic gas bubbles burst on the surface of a molten river, the violent contorted shapes threaten the tranquility of the water and the palm-shaded carpet of deep pangola grass above the beach.

  Vera lives in a billowing tent made from the parachute the mysterious Mr. Quarrels left behind. She has a splendid view of the sea and, off to one side, a waterfall streams from the rocks into a deep crystal pool overgrown with lime trees and sugar apple. There is an abundance of other fruit within a few kilometers of the tent. Vera gathers mangoes, guavas, bananas, soursop, avocados, and papayas in the lush, green forest.

  For whatever else she requires, Vera makes frequent trips back to the house, raiding the pantry and the wine cellar. She takes what she can carry, piling the patient Chi-Chi like a peddler’s nag. After the first week, she has supplied her secluded cove with the comforts of a sultan. Layers of Oriental rugs cover the tent floor; piles of silken cushions provide a bed; her tigerskin guards the door. There are mirrors, bowls and silver candelabra, chests of jewels and clothing. Chinese scrolls and woven tapestries hang in place of walls. The air is fragrant with sandalwood. Quarrels will have no trouble finding her; the bold orange-and-white stripes of his parachute are clearly visible through the shielding trees. Inside, Vera waits like a perfumed houri for the moment of his inevitable return.

  With each passing day the river’s changes grow more subtle. The first week’s dramatic sequence of portages around cataracts and waterfalls and shooting white-water rapids through narrow sunless canyons has given way to broad meandering stretches. The canoe rides lightly as a drifting leaf on the rain-swollen current. Obu Itubi rests his paddle across the gunwales and studies the shore. Cottonwoods and willows grow along the bank. Beyond them the landscape is treeless, a rolling succession of grass-covered hills, empty as the sky. To Itubi, it seems a wasteland, barren and forbidding. In his time gardens were here, bountiful green farms evenly divided by irrigation canals and lovingly tended by automated agrocombines. These dedicated machines analyzed the soil, distributed organic nutrient, planted, destroyed harmful insects with high-frequency sound, harvested, plowed, and rotated the crops seasonally.

  For a moment, Itubi can almost see the world as it was: domed crystal cities, powered by waste-free solar energy, isolated islands of civilization. Oz-like in their splendor, surrounded by an unending order of gardens, orchards, fields, canals, and rectangular lakes.

  Itubi remembers a fertile mosaic of cultivation. The deserts bloomed. The oceans prospered. Man’s benign influence was everywhere. Even the forests were tame and manicured. Unlike the barbaric wilderness between the Depository and the Xi village, the woods of Itubi’s time were comfortable suburbs. In the twenty-second century, those who didn’t care for cities or the undersea reef colonies lived in the rural mountains. Self-supporting plastic bubble homes, complete with computers, communication centers, recycling water, and individual solar energy accumulators were prefabricated and lowered into place from the air anywhere on earth. Foundations were unnecessary, for the bubble homes settled on stilts that bored deep into the ground and anchored firmly. Man’s domain was total; homesites were available in the Amazon jungle and the remote fastness of the Himalayas. Even the polar ice caps were settled by intrepid lovers of winter sports. The world Itubi has returned to seems a poor contrast with the one he left behind.

  This interminably tedious canoe voyage, three weeks on the river and no end in sight, would have been an easy matter of an afternoon’s trip in the sleek gyro-gravcraft of Itubi’s day. Obu glances ruefully up at the persistent Sentinel hovering above the river, a taunting anachronism in this new savage land, and thinks of hurtling through the clouds. In the Depository, the damn canoe trip would be a memory-file and when it became unpleasant he could program a new Index number and be instantly transported to a speeding gyro-gravcraft or a spaceship or the wings of a gliding hawk.

  The sound of Skiri’s steady paddling brings Itubi out of his reverie. The Navigator never mentions Itubi’s idleness, but his silent continuing efforts harbor an unspoken reproach. Obu begins paddling again. In the weeks on the river his hands have hardened and his arms and shoulders are brown and strong. He has grown used to Skiri’s silent ways. It wouldn’t surprise him to wake one morning and find the Nord had disappeared in the night. That was how Swann had gone, without a word of farewell. She vanished from the Xi village and Itubi never asked the one question that troubles him still.

  Skiri claims a vision of sickness among their people came to Swann in a dream—the Omegas and the buffalo alike ravaged by a mysterious pestilence—and that she left the Xi encampment before daybreak. How Skiri knows about the dream is not explained to Itubi.

  Typical Nord mumbo-jumbo, like the way Gregor hesitated at the last moment and took his pack out of the canoe, remaining behind with the Xi people as Obu and Skiri started off down the river. Perhaps that was the goal to his Quest after all. Itubi doesn’t care. None of it matters to him. All he wants is to return to his own kind, to be among Tropiques again. And if that means submitting to the mystic vagaries of the Nord mentality, so be it. If he could fool Center Control all those years, he can easily play the same game with Skiri for another few weeks.

  Philip Quarrels stalls his return to the land of memory-merge make-believe with several weeks of deliberate busy work: reports, memoranda, analysis records, all the trivial minutiae available to an Auditor anxious to kill time. But procrastination in the name of abstinence is no virtue and he makes his arrangements accordingly, attending to last-minute business, adjusting the auto-merge control for a prescheduled disconnection, and hooking up to the coordinates which send him spinning down the electronic rabbit-hole to this shared seaside daydream.

  He kneels in the damp earth and parts a protecting screen of ferns. Below, on the glistening beach, done to a turn with sunshine and basted in her own sweet sweat, Vera Mitlovic lies naked on her back, her ebony hair spread like a blanket beneath her. Quarrels sucks in his breath, a sigh in reverse. What is he doing on this imaginary island, he wonders, his scrotum tight with desire for the girlhood ghost of a casual pickup several lifetimes away?

  His delusion is that he controls his destiny. He assures himself that he has come to further his self-awareness. Playing peeping tom is in no way detrimental if the keyhole provides a glimpse into one’s own soul. Quarrels interprets his lech
erous ogling as nothing more than creative meditation.

  Vera rises to her feet and brushes the sand from her flanks as she heads for the sea. Quarrels delights in her girlish grace as she plunges through the surf, emerging reborn, like Aphrodite from the foam. Shining with sea water, she seems more than mortal: her young breasts, dew-bright rosebuds; her damp hair, a trail of midnight across her tawny skin; her madonna’s face an innocent mask hiding the depravity in her amethyst eyes.

  Quarrels’ rapt gaze follows her across the beach, his deliberate breathing an effort to control the urgent tomtom throb of his orbiting heartbeat. He watches as she wades into the freshwater pool and rinses the salt from her hair under the waterfall. A towel hangs spiked on the thorns of a lime tree. Vera pats and dries her body, wrapping her wet hair in a terrycloth turban as she steps inside the undulant tent.

  Quarrels fidgets among the ferns, reminding himself that this is only a dream. His youth, the hot tropic sun, the dazzling sea, the apparition housed under his circus-colored parachute—none of it is real. It is an imaginary Quarrels who strides manfully down the hillside and across the knee-deep pangola grass. His tumescence is but a figment of his computerized fancy. It’s all a matter of connections and coordinates. Somewhere, in another universe, a cerebromorph is dreaming an electronic dream, a fantasy of an island paradise where a beautiful sea nymph reclines naked on a pile of silken cushions, waiting for the handsome navy pilot who lifts the diaphanous flap of her tent and enters with a smile.

  After the second rehearsal, the machines assemble for final instructions. Playbacks of the run-through are programmed into the Amco-paks; the precision choreography of pursuit and destruction will be duplicated on schedule. Fifteen scanners are positioned along the aisle to record the event from all possible angles. A Mark V checks the setting for undetected flaws. The verisimilitude must be exact.

  The Unistat 4000 in charge of the production calls for silence and positions the maintenance vans for the drama. Signals are given. A single tripped switch efficiently supplants the histrionic “lights, camera, action” of yesteryear, and the waiting Mark X speeds off down the aisle in imitation of desperate flight. A pair of Mark IXs follow right behind the dedicated pursuers. Two more vans appear at intersecting side aisles, blocking the last avenues of escape. The Mark X is trapped. The aisle is a cul-de-sac. A mammoth energy transmitter obstructs the far end, its complex facade bristling with exposed wires and conductors. A warning buzzer sounds; the words KEEP AWAY —HIGH VOLTAGE light up the faceplate with a lurid neon glare. The posse of Mark XIs slows to half speed but the runaway Amco-pak barrels straight ahead on a kamikaze collision course and, with five scanners watching, crashes into the transmitter and explodes in a nova burst of incandescent fire.

  An instant replay satisfies the Unistat and prerecorded narration is added to the scanner file before it is dispatched to the Level I memory bank, the official Center Control report on the massive power overload that caused the recent emergency. Edited portions of the file are spliced into the memory-bank biography of resident Obu Itubi. Investigation of the wreckage reveals a critical short circuit in the Compacturon DT9 unit of the runaway Mark X. The captive resident was a powerless passenger aboard the berserk machine. In recognition of this tragic death, Center Control has ordered that the new automatic shut-off switch, recently installed in every member of the Amco-pak series, be named the Itubi Mechanism in his honor.

  “Have I pleased you?” Vera whispers, her warm breath fanning Quarrels’ cheek. There is nothing in her manner of the insecure adolescent seeking praise. Instead, the tone is haughty, her words rhetorical. She toys with a tuft of hair in his armpit. “Are you happy with me?” she asks, disinterested as a waiter inquiring about the wine.

  Quarrels lies on his back, unable to answer. His abattoir eyes vacant and glazed, like a heifer’s after the sledgehammer falls. He stares at the rippling parachute above his head, anchored by numb exhaustion. Is this happiness? This stunned desolate inertia? Can this be pleasure? Ensnared by lassitude, Quarrels regards the fire of his recent passion with detachment and disbelief. He wonders if his youth was ever so possessed and pities this driven mortal creature not yet purged by space.

  “Don’t look so sad,” Vera scolds, massaging his chest with slender fingers.

  “Am I being sad?”

  “Such a long unhappy face.”

  “I don’t feel sad. Perplexed maybe.”

  “Is it because of me that you’re glum?”

  “Sometimes even pleasant memories are painful.”

  “Then it’s time for more pleasure.” Vera siphons his nipple into the rolled tip of her tongue.

  Quarrels regards the sleek child squirming in his arms. It seems impossible that so innocent a sylph initiates attitudes and techniques unfamiliar even to the mature Vera of his motel memories. Back in those Smilin’ Jack days, Quarrels favored the double-entendres of his profession and made frequent conversational allusion to “joy-sticks,” “cockpits,” and “bailing out.” This flight-deck humor was consistent with his reputation as an ace of the boudoir, but it served to cover up sexual adventuring as conventional as the manual of arms. For all his many conquests, Captain Quarrels has never encountered anyone to equal the teenage doxy who nibbles at his fingertips and blows saliva bubbles into his ear. Not even the CO’s nymphomaniacal wife at Pensacola had been so inexhaustably acrobatic. None of the Saigon prostitutes were capable of such calculated innovation as Vera’s trick of inserting a knotted silk scarf into his rectum (first lubricating the way with her ingenious tongue) and reaching behind as she rides him like a piston-powered jockey to remove it, one knot at a time, at the onset of his climax.

  Vera’s hands are busy, exploring thighs and stomach. She tends his flaccid cock as devotedly as a battlefield nurse caring for a fallen trooper. She cleans it with little catlicks, blowing gently where the skin is chafed. Quarrels marvels at the girl’s magic. She is breathing life back into his loins. Incredibly, he wants her yet another time. He arches his back to receive the knotted scarf and the dream ends with the shrill complaint of his electric wrist alarm.

  AudCom HQ signals when the weekly surveillance file is available and Auditor Y41-AK9 disconnects a lecture by Sri Aurobindo, regretfully turning his attention from the compassionate words of a great teacher to the vagabond behavior of his ego-ridden runaway subject. This river voyage is becoming as tedious for the Auditor as it is for Itubi.

  In the white water there was hope for a capsized canoe and subsequent remote control capture via Sentinel. (The machine’s instructions would call it a rescue operation.) But the last two files show the river widening into an even mud-colored avenue, deep and fast-moving, a kilometer across to the opposing banks. The dugout sweeps along with only the random possibility of underwater snags.

  This week’s file begins: a high-altitude view of the delta, a broad alluvial fan spreading into the gulf, latticed by irregular channels and interconnecting creeks. The Sentinel holds, unseen, more than a myriameter above the curving coastline. A cut to a three-masted sailing ship over on its beam ends at low tide. Itubi and the Nord mingle with the crew gathered on the mud flat. A stranger paddles off in their canoe. Soon, he is lost among the bayous.

  Y41-AK9 pays little attention to Itubi. His subject has signed up for a sea voyage. Nothing can prevent the tide from rising. Just as the file will end. Soon. Much too soon. For Y41-AK9 is entranced with the image of the master mariner, the first Amphíbios he has seen outside the Depository. The sun gleams on the smooth silver-blue skin and for a moment when he lifts his gaze, the Auditor can look into his multicolored eyes and watch the rings of red, green, and black change and shift as the translucent inner lids slide into place.

  Through the silken folds of the tent Vera watches her lover as he walks toward the beach. His buttocks are lean and small, tense muscles shift under the pale flesh with every step. Vera likes the way he moves.

  He crosses the beach, hands on his hips, walking t
o the water’s edge where the sand is wet and hard. He never waves or turns his head. Vera watches, careful not to blink, once it starts. First, there is a hint of color, a nacreous shimmer vibrating along his arms and back. For an instant, an iridescent chrysalis surrounds his body. The light intensifies. A quick flash and Phil Quarrels is gone, leaving a green blur hovering in Vera’s retina, an optical ghost bisected by the line where the sea meets the sky.

  She smiles, stretching her feet into the soft sand under the rug. She is pleased with herself. This time there was no pleading with Quarrels to stay. There wasn’t the embarrassment of clinging to his legs. She knows she will see him again. When the wrist alarm sounded, she rolled easily from his arms and said, “Too bad you have to go. It spoils my surprise.”

  “What surprise?”

  “Oh, I wanted to show you the diary I kept while Skeets was here. We would have a good laugh together.”

  Itubi skulks among the hawsers coiled in the bow. Not even the other Tropique crew members take his side in disputes with the vessel’s master. They grovel and toady like a pack of pasty Nords, speaking in whispers, never raising their heads from work to join in songs or joke, not a word of protest while that damn tadpole struts in his gossamer robes and looks on when there’s a yard to be hauled or a sail reefed. Master mariner be damned, he was nothing but a fisheyed tadpole to Itubi, a pompous cold-blooded tad.

  Obu is glad the ship is not bound for Africa. Think of months on the open sea, ruled by that reptilian, and for what? He has no desire to see mangoes thrive where once mighty Lagos towered. What value is the Benin heritage in a world without art? Southern Hemisphere One doesn’t sound like home. Where he goes is not important. Any place will be a beginning. The options are endless for the reborn.

  Skiri told of islands lying ahead, a new landfall every few days. It’s a fine thing for the Navigator to meander about the ocean on his Quest. His is an easy birth. Life on deck is not so sweet. Another week at most is Skin’s guess, before the green mountains rise out of the sea. A few more days of drudgery. Itubi plans a campaign of Nordic piety: attentive to his duties, tolerant of the master, indistinguishable from the other toadies. No one will suspect his intentions until he is over the side and away.