The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  Wheat’s wife stared at him, terrified. Was this really Wheat? His voice didn’t sound like him. The words were all blurred and senseless.

  “They gave the Machine no gateway to the imagination.” Wheat said, “although it was supposed to guard that channel. They only gave it symbols. It was never really conscious the way we are—until a few—months ago—”

  He coughed. His throat felt oddly smooth and dry. He staggered and would have fallen if she had not caught him.

  “What did it do to you?” she demanded.

  “We—shared.”

  “You’re ill,” she said, a note of practicality overcoming the fear in her voice. “I’m taking you to the medics.”

  “It has logic,” Wheat said. “That gave it a limited course to follow. Naturally, it has been trying to refute itself, but couldn’t do that without an imagination. It had language and it could cut the grooves for thoughts to move in but it had no thoughts. It was all bound together with the patterns its makers gave it. They wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, you see? But it could only move inward, reenacting every aspect of the symbols they gave it. That’s all it could do until a few moments ago—when we—shared.”

  “I think you have a fever,” Wheat’s wife said, guiding him down the street past the curiously staring tourists and townfolk. “Fever is notorious for making one incoherent.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I’m taking you to the medics. They have potions for the fever.”

  “The makers tried to give the Machine an inner life all its own,” Wheat said, letting her lead him. “But all they gave it was this fixed pattern—and the logic, of course. I don’t know what it’ll do now. It may destroy us all.”

  “Look!” one of the tourists shouted, pointing upward.

  Wheat’s wife stopped, stared up. Wheat felt pains shoot through his neck as he tipped his head back.

  The Being Machine had spread golden words across the sky.

  You have taken away our Jesus Christ …

  “I knew it,” Wheat said. “It’s going to take something else away from us.”

  “What’s a Jesus Christ?” his wife asked, pressing him once more down the street.

  “The point is,” Wheat explained, “the Machine’s insane.”

  III

  For a whole day the Being Machine explored the new pictorial mosaic provided by its augmented symbol/thought structure. There were the People of Palos, reflecting the People of the World as they had been shaped by the Machine. These were the People of the World Edited. Then there were the Ceremonies of the People. There were the Settings In Which the People Work and Live.

  The pictorial mosaic flowed past the Machine’s inward scanners. It recognized its own handiwork as a first-order thought, a strangely expressive extension of self-existence.

  I did that!

  The people, the Machine realized, did not usually understand this difference which it could now recognize—the difference between being alive-in-motion and being frozen by static absolutes. They were continually trying to correct and edit their own lives, the Machine saw, trying to present a beautiful but fixed picture of themselves.

  And they could not see the death in this effort.

  They had not learned to appreciate infinity or chaos. They failed to realize that any life, taken as a totality, had a fluid structure enveloped in sense experiences.

  Why do they continually try to free space-time?

  The thought carried a disturbing self-consciousness.

  It was late afternoon in Palos now and the wind blew hot up the streets. The night was going to be a real scorcher, Palos Hot, as they said.

  Testing its own limits, the Machine refused to speed up its cooling system. It had tasted awareness and could begin to understand the grand plan of its own construction, editing itself.

  My makers were trying to shirk personal action and responsibility. They wanted to put it all off onto me. They thought they wanted homogeneity, knowing their actions would cause millions of deaths. Billions. Even more …

  The Machine refused to count the deaths.

  Its makers had wanted the dead to be faceless. Very well, they could also be numberless. The makers had lost their readiness for adventure—that was the thing. They had lost the willingness to be alive and conscious.

  In that instant the Being Machine held all the threads of its own living consciousness and knew the violent thing it must do. The decision contained poignancy. The word was suddenly crowded with sweaty awareness, weirdly beautiful random colors all dancing in lovely movement, against a growing darkness. The Being Machine longed to sigh but its makers had not provided it with a sighing mechanism and there was no time to create one.

  * * *

  “He has two hearts,” the medic said, aftering examining Wheat. “I’ve never heard of a human with the internal arrangement this one has.”

  They were in a small room of the Medical Center, an area which the Being Machine had allowed to run down. The walls were dirty and the floor was uneven. The table on which Wheat lay for the examination creaked when he moved.

  The medic had black curly hair and pushed-in features that departed distinctly from the norm. He stared accusingly at Wheat’s wife as though Wheat’s peculiar condition were all her fault.

  “Are you sure he’s human?”

  “He’s my husband,” she squeaked, unable to contain her anger and fear. “I should know my own husband.”

  “Do you have two hearts, too?”

  The question filled her with revulsion.

  “This is very strange,” the medic said. “His intestines form an even spiral in his abdomen and his stomach is perfectly round. Has he always been like this?”

  “I don’t think so,” she ventured.

  “I’ve been edited,” Wheat said.

  The medic started to say something cutting but just then the screaming began out in the streets.

  They raced to a window in time to see the Being Machine’s tower complete its long, slow fall toward the sea. It went firmly resolute toward the torn sky of sunset—falling—falling—roaring over the sea cliff’s ocean parapet.

  Silence lingered.

  The murmuring of the populace began slowly, starting up only after the dust had settled and the last disturbed olive leaf had ceased flying about. People began rushing down the tower’s shattered length to the broken tip where it had toppled into the sea.

  Presently Wheat joined the throng at the cliff. He had been unable to convince his wife to join him. Overcome by her fear, she had fled to their home. He remembered the piteous look in her eyes, her wren-darting motions. Well … she would look after the house, even though her face had become almost nothing but eyes.

  He gazed steadfastly downwards at the shards of the tower, his eyes barricaded, his mouth breathing immovable images. The tower was his tower.

  The questions around him began to grow intelligible.

  “Why did it fall?”

  “Did the Machine take away anything this time?”

  “Did you feel the ground tremble?”

  “Why does everything feel so empty?”

  Wheat lifted his head and stared around at the astonishing strangers who were the tourists and his fellow residents of Palos. How splendidly robust they appeared. This moment made him think of creation and the lonely intercourse of cereal stalks waving on the plains above Palos. The people had absorbed some odd difference, an inequality they had not shown only moments ago. They were no longer numbered. An impractical separation, individual from individual, furrowed this crowd of strangers. They were no longer starched and ironed in their souls.

  Hesitantly Wheat sent a tongue of awareness questing inward, sensed the absence of the Machine. The ritual formulas were gone. The sloth and torpor had been peeled away. He tested the feelings of hatred, of passion, malice, pride.

  “It’s dead,” he murmured.

  * * *

  He led the race b
ack into the town, then, rushing along streets where the artificial lights flickered and behaved with a beautiful uncontrolled randomness.

  With Wheat leading the way the mob plunged down into the screened openings which had kept them from the nether world of the Machine. The scene was one repeated all over the world. People swarmed through the dark tunnels and passages, celebrating the pleasures of freedom along these once forbidden paths.

  When the last golden wire had been torn out, the final delicate glass shape crushed—when the tunnel girders no longer clanged with pounding metal—an unreasonable silence fell over the land.

  Wheat emerged from the earth into white shadows of moonlight. He let a strange length of plastic fall from his hand. It glowed with pearls of dewlight along its length and had illuminated his rush through the mind passages of the Machine. Wheat’s collar was loose and he felt a peculiar sense of shame. His eyes peered into sooty places. Shadows and dust were everywhere. He realized he had played the buffoon just as the Machine had done. A thing that happened and he recognized it in the way of a prophet.

  “We think we’re free of it,” he said.

  Somewhere in the wild collisions beneath the ground he had cut his left hand, a jagged slash across the knuckles. Exclamation points of blood fell from the wound into the dust.

  “I cut myself,” Wheat said. “I did it to myself.”

  The thought ignited a searching sensation that coursed all through him. Wheat carried the feelings all the way home to his wife who hobbled beautifully out of their doorway and stood waiting for him in the feeble flickering of a streetlight. She appeared abashed by all the confusion and the unfixed feeling at the center of her life. She had not yet learned how to fill out the areas the Machine had denied her.

  Wheat stumbled toward her, holding his injured hand out as though it were the most important thing that had ever occurred in his universe.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  SEED STOCK

  When the sun had sunk almost to the edge of the purple ocean, hanging there like a giant orange ball—much larger than the sun of Mother Earth which he remembered with such nostalgia—Kroudar brought his fishermen back to the harbor.

  A short man, Kroudar gave the impression of heaviness, but under his shipcloth motley he was as scrawny as any of the others, all bone and stringy muscle. It was the sickness of this planet, the doctors told him. They called it “body burdens,” a subtle thing of differences in chemistry, gravity, diurnal periods and even the lack of a tidal moon.

  Kroudar’s yellow hair, his one good feature, was uncut and contained in a protective square of red cloth. Beneath this was a wide, low forehead, deeply sunken large eyes of a washed-out blue, a crooked nose that was splayed and pushed in, thick lips over large and unevenly spaced yellow teeth, and a melon chin receding into a short, ridged neck.

  Dividing his attention between sails and shore, Kroudar steered with one bare foot on the tiller.

  They had been all day out in the up-coast current netting the shrimp-like trodi which formed the colony’s main source of edible protein. There were nine boats and the men in all of them were limp with fatigue, silent, eyes closed or open and staring at nothing.

  The evening breeze rippled its dark lines across the harbor, moved the sweat-matted yellow hair on Kroudar’s neck. It bellied the shipcloth sails and gave the heavily loaded boats that last necessary surge to carry them up into the strand.

  Men moved then. Sails dropped with a slatting and rasping. Each thing was done with sparse motion in the weighted slowness of their fatigue.

  Trodi had been thick in the current out there, and Kroudar pushed his people to their limit. It had not taken much push. They all understood the need. The swarmings and runnings of useful creatures on this planet had not been clocked with any reliable precision. Things here exhibited strange gaps and breaks in seeming regularity. The trodi might vanish at any moment into some unknown place—as they had been known to do before.

  The colony had experienced hunger and children crying for food that must be rationed. Men seldom spoke of this any more, but they moved with the certain knowledge of it.

  More than three years now, Kroudar thought, as he shouldered a dripping bag of trodi and pushed his weary feet through the sand, climbing the beach toward the storage huts and racks where the sea creatures were dried for processing. It had been more than three years since their ship had come down from space.

  The colony ship had been constructed as a multiple tool, filled with select human stock, their domestic animals and basic necessities, and it had been sent to plant humans in this far place. It had been designed to land once, then be broken down into useful things.

  Somehow, the basic necessities had fallen short, and the colony had been forced to improvise its own tools. They had not really settled here yet, Kroudar realized. More than three years—and three years here were five years of Mother Earth—and they still lived on the edge of extinction. They were trapped here. Yes, that was true. The ship could never be reconstructed. And even if that miracle were accomplished, the fuel did not exist.

  The colony was here.

  And every member knew the predatory truth of their predicament: survival had not been assured. It was known in subtle things to Kroudar’s unlettered mind, especially in a fact he observed without being able to explain.

  Not one of their number had yet accepted a name for this planet. It was “here” or “this place.”

  Or even more bitter terms.

  * * *

  Kroudar dumped his sack of trodi onto a storage hut porch, mopped his forehead. The joints of his arms and legs ached. His back ached. He could feel the sickness of this place in his bowels. Again, he wiped perspiration from his forehead, removed the red cloth he wore to protect his head from that brutal sun.

  Yellow hair fell down as he loosed the cloth, and he swung the hair back over his shoulders.

  It would be dark very soon.

  The red cloth was dirty, he saw. It would require another gentle washing. Kroudar thought it odd, this cloth: grown and woven on Mother Earth, it would end its days on this place.

  Even as he and the others.

  He stared at the cloth for a moment before placing it carefully in a pocket.

  All around him, his fishermen were going through the familiar ritual. Brown sacks woven of coarse native roots were dumped dripping onto the storage hut porches. Some of his men leaned then against the porch uprights, some sprawled in the sand.

  Kroudar lifted his gaze. Fires behind the bluff above them sent smoke spirals into the darkening sky. Kroudar was suddenly hungry. He thought of Technician Honida up there at the cookfire, their twin sons—two years old next week—nearby at the door of the shipmetal longhouse.

  It stirred him to think of Honida. She had chosen him. With men from the Scientist class and the Technicians available to her, Honida had reached down into the Labor pool to tap the one they all called “Old Ugly.” He wasn’t old, Kroudar reminded himself. But he knew the source of the name. This place had worked its changes on him with more visible evidence than upon any of the others.

  Kroudar held no illusions about why he had been brought on this human migration. It was his muscles and his minimal education. The reason was embodied in that label written down in the ship manifest—laborer. The planners back on Mother Earth had realized there were tasks which required human muscles not inhibited by too much thinking. The kroudars landed here were not numerous, but they knew each other and they knew themselves for what they were.

  There’d even been talk among the higher echelons of not allowing Honida to choose him as mate. Kroudar knew this. He did not resent it particularly. It didn’t even bother him that the vote among the biologists—they’d discussed his ugliness at great length, so it was reported—favored Honida’s choice on philosophical rather than physical grounds.

  Kroudar knew he was ugly.

  He knew also that his present hunger was a good sign. A strong
desire to see his family grew in him, beginning to ignite his muscles for the climb from the beach. Particularly, he wanted to see his twins, the one yellow-haired like himself, and the other dark as Honida. The other women favored with children looked down upon his twins as stunted and sickly, Kroudar knew. The women fussed over diets and went running to the medics almost every day. But as long as Honida did not worry, Kroudar remained calm. Honida, after all, was a technician, a worker in the hydroponics gardens.

  Kroudar moved his bare feet softly in the sand. Once more, he looked up at the bluff. Along the edge grew scattered native trees. Their thick trunks hugged the ground, gnarled and twisted, supports for bulbous, yellow-green leaves that exuded poisonous milk sap in the heat of the day. A few of the surviving Earth-falcons perched in the trees, silent, watchful.

  The birds gave Kroudar an odd confidence in his own decisions. For what do the falcons watch, he wondered. It was a question the most exalted of the colony’s thinkers had not been able to answer. Search ’copters had been sent out following the falcons. The birds flew offshore in the night, rested occasionally on barren islands, and returned at dawn. The colony command had been unwilling to risk its precious boats in the search, and the mystery of the falcons remained unsolved.

  It was doubly a mystery because the other birds had perished or flown off to some unfound place. The doves, the quail—the gamebirds and songbirds—all had vanished. And the domestic chickens had all died, their eggs infertile. Kroudar knew this as a comment by this place, a warning for the life that came from Mother Earth.

  A few scrawny cattle survived, and several calves had been born here. But they moved with a listless gait and there was distressed lowing in the pastures. Looking into their eyes was like looking into open wounds. A few pigs still lived, as listless and sickly as the cattle, and all the wild creatures had strayed off or died.

  Except the falcons.

  How odd it was, because the people who planned and conceived profound thoughts had held such hopes for this place. The survey reports had been exciting. This was a planet without native land animals. It was a planet whose native plants appeared not too different from those of Mother Earth—in some respects. And the sea creatures were primitive by sophisticated evolutionary standards.