Kampus

by James Gunn

  Everybody laughed.

  “What Sally doesn't say,” Jay-Jay continued, “is that she does everything everybody else does, and more, too.”

  “What are you particularly interested in?” Gavin asked.

  “I'm trying to perfect the person-computer symbiosis,” Sally said. “Not just biofeedback, but an interchange of thoughts—yes, and feelings—with the computer.” She smiled at Gavin. “Maybe I'll give you a personal demonstration.”

  Mary asked about Elaine's black eye and Gavin's bruises. By the time Gavin had finished describing how they had been received, the evening was over. Sally stood up, and as if that were a signal, everyone else stood. Gavin and Elaine joined them. Sally came around to them from her place at the head of the table, and took their arms and ushered them through the drawing room and up the big staircase to their adjoining rooms.

  As they went, she said, “The family has to meet briefly about family matters. I want to talk to you, Gavin, a little later. There are books in your rooms. Of course, you're perfectly free to walk around the grounds or out in Denver if you wish, but I would like to have a moment or two with you a little later.”

  Elaine looked at Sally with a fleeting smile.

  “If you don't mind, my dear,” Sally said to her.

  “Why should I mind?” Elaine said. “And if I did mind, what would it matter?”

  Gavin for once was silent. He shut the door of his room behind him. It was a big room with tall ceilings. An old wooden dresser and mirror, both immaculately restored, stood against the near wall. A bookcase—a sectional case made of oak with glass fronts that lifted and slid over the books—was against the far wall beside the big window framing the night. But Gavin walked slowly across the oval braided rug to the bed, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on the bed fully clothed, staring unseeing at the ceiling and its hemispherical glass chandelier. Too many things had happened too quickly. The world was spinning around too fast. He touched his bruises gingerly.

  “Maybe you would understand it, Professor,” he thought, “but my old certainties are being chipped and cracked. I feel the urge to protect them, but I suspect that they soon will be gone, and I have found nothing to put in their place.”

  “That is the first function of education,” the Professor said, “to sweep the mind clean of old rubbish.”

  “But what about the replacement? Education must not merely destroy; it must also teach.”

  “That will come,” the Professor said confidently.

  The next sensation Gavin had was the bed sinking under him. Gentle fingers touched his face. He realized that he must have fallen asleep, and he looked up expecting to see Elaine. But the vivid face bending over him was Sally's.

  “Ah,” she said. “You're awake. I have good news.” Gavin tried to sit up, but she pushed him back gently. “No, don't get up. You see, the family has invited you to join us.”

  “Join you?” Gavin said.

  “As a husband,” Sally said patiently. “As a full partner in our family enterprises.”

  “But I just walked in here this afternoon.”

  “The family doesn't act rashly, but it doesn't hesitate when it knows what it needs. Jay-Jay arrived one morning to work on the computer, and never left.”

  “But I don't have any skills,” Gavin said. “I'm just a student.” He was even more confused now, unable to imagine even what was being offered him. The elegant life downstairs, the work, the play, the women, Sally....It was all seductive and unimaginable. From hovel to mansion within a week.

  “We think you have something to bring to the family: youth, vigor, promise, intelligence,” Sally said. “And we think we have something to offer.”

  Gavin looked at the dramatic curve of her breasts swelling above him, and he said, “Of course. What about Elaine?”

  Sally looked away and then back at him. “I thought there wasn't anything between you. You just happened to be traveling together.”

  “She's here because of me,” Gavin said. “I couldn't just abandon her.”

  “Of course, we'll see that she gets wherever she's going,” Sally said.

  “She isn't included in the offer to join the family?”

  “No,” Sally said quickly. “Not unless those are the only conditions under which you'll join,” she added, as if she saw an expression on Gavin's face which he did not recognize. “We will need another female,” Sally went on, “but we must choose her carefully for balance, for psychological suitability, for family commitment. In any case, I don't think Elaine would be interested.”

  “Why not?”

  Sally shrugged humorously. “There still are a few old-fashioned women around. I think she's one of them. I think she's a one-man woman.”

  “I wouldn't be able to answer now,” Gavin said. He gestured helplessly with his hands. “I was going to the West Coast...”

  “We want you to consider the matter very carefully,” Sally said. “Take all the time you need. But we do want you to know that we want you.” The way she said “we” made it sound like “I.” As if for punctuation, she leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips, avoiding his bruises, but even their light touch promised Gavin delights of which he had never dreamed.

  She had been gone for only a minute or two when Gavin heard a knock at the door between his room and Elaine's, and then the door opened and Elaine came into the room. She was wearing a nightgown—lent to her, apparently, by Susan—and her breasts barely dented the cloth. Her face was scrubbed and pale except where her eye was beginning to shade from purple into yellow. Compared to Sally, she was colorless, and Gavin felt a stir of sympathy for her.

  “I heard voices,” she said. “I thought it might be important.” Gavin started to sit up, but Elaine said, “No, don't get up.” She sat on the edge of the bed, where Sally had sat, hugging herself for warmth. “Was it something I should know about?”

  “Sally asked me to join the family,” Gavin said.

  “She wants you,” Elaine said. She sounded a little sad.

  “The family wants me,” Gavin corrected.

  “What Sally wants, the family wants.”

  “They voted.”

  “I can see them voting,” Elaine said. “Sally told them it was a good idea and convinced them it was theirs.”

  “She said,” Gavin continued, “that they would see that you got wherever you were going. If I decide to stay.”

  “Are you going to stay?”

  “I don't know,” Gavin said. “I hadn't thought about anything like this. I was going to the West Coast.” He hesitated. “She also said that they would take you, too, if that was the only condition under which I would join.” He studied her face, but there was nothing inscrutable about her reaction.

  She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “That's my definition of hell,” she said. “Being dependent upon seven other people. Independence is what I want. I can't imagine anyone joining a group marriage, much less myself. But if that's your thing....”

  “I don't know,” Gavin said. He didn't know. It wasn't the Professor's thing, and it didn't fit with anything that Gavin had considered his goals up to now. And then there was Jenny—and Berkeley and everything it promised. There was so much he didn't know, so much that he might be giving up, so much that he might learn, so much that might happen to him if he left. But he knew the exciting possibilities that were here for him if he stayed.

  “Postpone your decision for a while,” Elaine said lightly. “She gives samples. So will Susan.”

  She leaned over toward him, much like Sally, but thin and light, almost insubstantial, where Sally had been solid and earthy, and touched his lips with hers. In the touch was no promise of exquisite delights, but a kind of purity that stirred another kind of response akin to the sympathy he had felt earlier; and he reached for her. He thought he felt her hesitate, but perhaps she was withdrawing all the while.

  She stood at the edge of the bed, beyond his reach. “Not while you're thinking about t
hat improbable, overstuffed wench. Maybe not at all.”

  And she was gone, and the door opened, with a brief gust of air, and clicked shut, and a key turned in the lock, and Gavin was left with silence and his thoughts.

  Gavin went to sleep quickly. The past twenty-four hours had been so packed with events that the first of them seemed like history, and he did not realize how tired he was until he let his body sink into the embrace of the mattress and Morpheus. Only a short time later—at least, it seemed only a short time—he was awakened by a strange sound, a sussuration, a faint whistling interrupted by changes in tone and timbre. At first Gavin thought of a machine, some kind of engine, perhaps run by steam or compressed air, moving a piston back and forth in a silken cylinder; and then he thought of an animal, a large animal like a lion or a bear, snuffling toward him in the dark.

  The tempo of the sound quickened. In the dark, his body taut with listening, Gavin realized that there was something human about the sound, something human and fraught with significance, something urgent and growing more urgent by the minute. He got up in the dark and tried to locate the source of the sound, moving quietly among the scattered furniture. He listened at Elaine's door for a moment, but her room was silent. The sound seemed to be coming from the window.

  At the window Gavin saw that the converted carriage house in back streamed light from an upper window, where once bales of hay had been lifted into a loft to feed the horses stabled below, a window he had not noticed when he had been in that room.

  He was drawn toward the sound. Its tempo had increased. Its urgency seemed to be approaching a climax. Something had to happen. Gavin slipped into his shirt and trousers and went silently down the stairs, lighted now by a single bulb in the massive crystal chandelier that hung in the broad hall, and through the kitchen and out the back door. The sound had faded as he left the room and had become inaudible as he went down the stairs, but Gavin thought he knew where to go.

  The door to the laboratory was unlocked. Gavin went down the corridor and up the stairs toward the second floor, and while he went, the sound began again and grew louder, louder even than he had heard it in his room; it was faster now, too, as if the person who made the sound was gasping for breath. He wondered briefly, without distraction from his central quest, why he had heard it so clearly in his room and not in the rest of the house, not on the grass and pavement that lay between the house and the laboratory.

  And as he came to the head of the stairs, even before he saw what had drawn him to this spot, he realized what the sound was and where he had heard it before. It was the sound of a woman in the throes of passion. He would have stopped there and retreated from the embarrassment of interrupting a sexual encounter, but he already was at the head of the stairs and he had seen what was on the couch in the center of the room, and he could not move.

  The scene was barbaric, like some ancient fertility rite; or, considering the electronic apparatus that lined the room, the cables that traversed the floor, the computers that clicked and chuckled against the walls while reels spun and stopped within their glassy fronts and colored lights flickered across the consoles, like an updated nineteenth-century laboratory, a modern version of the mad place where Dr. Frankenstein had committed the ultimate blasphemy....

  Only one person was upon the couch. Naked, face upward, her red hair covered by a cap, like a fancy bathing cap fastened under the chin, from which wires trailed to a plug at the head of the couch, lay the magnificent Sally looking more than ever like an earth goddess, a sex goddess, her body oversized perfection, rippling now with periodic contractions that traveled from her toes up fully fashioned legs and thighs past generous hips and a luxuriantly decorated pubic mound to tapering waist and exquisitely rounded and mounded breasts pointing tight, tumescent coral nipples toward the ceiling, up straining columnar throat to a strong and beautiful face, eyes closed, lips parted, breath hastening in and out...

  A moan came from between Sally's parted lips. Her pelvis tightened and thrust. She moaned again and again. A series of “ahs” burst from her throat and were, at the end, prolonged into a sigh.

  Gavin could not move. Sally had perfected the autoerotic art. She was able to recapitulate the act of sex entirely through mental control, a kind of masterful dream fulfillment while she was wide-awake, a feat of mental discipline more astonishing than anything she had described.

  Or else, he thought, the cap linked her to the computer, to her lover the computer, and she was copulating with the machine.

  Coming up out of the disturbed sea of his thoughts, he saw her blue eyes open and looking at him. She lay there still and unashamed upon the couch, and looked at him and smiled.

  “You're next,” she said clearly.

  Without conscious volition, he found himself moving toward the couch, toward her, thinking of soft flesh and rounded limbs and tissues responsive each in their own ways; and his arms half-parted, only to discover that Sally had moved, she had taken off the cap, and she was standing beside the couch helping him down upon it.

  He let her fasten the cap on his head, so close to him that he could have reached out and clasped her anywhere, so close as she moved that he could feel the heavy weight of her breasts upon his chest and feel one nipple brush his cheek.

  Next, he thought, he was next with the machine, and he didn't know what he was doing there. He didn't know what he should expect.

  “I thought the sounds would attract you,” Sally said as she tightened the strap under his chin. “It always works. Now,” she said, stepping back, “relax and get in touch with the machine.”

  His mind was making so much noise that there wasn't room for anything else inside his head.

  “You're tense,” she said.

  “Of course I am!” Gavin snapped. “This is all new to me, I don't know what's going to happen, I don't know what to do or what to look for, and it hasn't been exactly a relaxing experience up to now!”

  “I understand,” Sally said sympathetically, “but you've got to relax if this is going to work. Here, let me massage your tense shoulder muscles.”

  That wasn't the place he was tense, he thought, but she stood behind him, behind the cap and the wires, and he felt her hands kneading his shoulders, but he didn't relax. He couldn't help thinking about her standing there in all her magnificent nudity, as if this were some old-fashioned massage parlor.

  “You're not relaxing,” she said. “The first thing you should do is think commands at the little white dot on the oscilloscope above your head.”

  He looked up. There was an oscilloscope he had not noticed before; apparently it had been lowered from the ceiling when his attention had been elsewhere. A white dot was motionless in the middle of the screen.

  “Think ‘up,"’ Sally said. “Think ‘down,’ or ‘right’ or ‘left’ or ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ or ‘circle’ or ‘stop.’ When you have it under control, doing what you want, then try something more daring. Ask questions, seek information, and then, if you're doing well, you can seek sensations as well. But that may not come until the next time, or the time after that. Now, relax! Relax-x-x! Relax-x-x-x-x...”

  “It doesn't help that you're standing back there without any clothes on!”

  “All right,” she said. “I'll leave you here alone. Play with the system. See what feedback you can get from the computer. When you get tired, the off switch is under your right hand, on the side of the couch. If you want to ... talk about your experience, if you're still tense, my room is at the head of the stairs, on the right. The door is always unlocked.”

  Gavin could hear the Professor (or was it Elaine?) say, “I'll bet it is.”

  Her footsteps receded across the room and down the stairs. He heard the outer door open and shut, and he was alone with the computer.

  Thoughts pounded through his head. Images appeared in his mind and did things that he could not control, and were replaced by other images in recalcitrant tableaux, but at last his breathing slowed and his brain s
topped churning and he heard a murmuring inside his head, as if a bee were loose there and buzzing quietly, sitting, its thorax swelling and contracting, if that's what bees did when they buzzed, its wings moving gently in time with the sound. And then there was a whole hive of bees, all contentedly humming away.

  The dot on the oscilloscope jumped and was still. “Right,” he thought. The dot moved right. “Left.” It reversed its path. “Up. Down. Fast. Slow. Circle.”

  The dot responded obediently, and in a little while, as he reckoned the passage of time, he had it doing figure eights and inscribing all sorts of geometric figures on the greenish screen. For a while that was enough, controlling the dot, feeling like a mental giant, but after a few more minutes the game seemed childish, elementary, boring, and he thought “off.” The dot vanished.

  More abstract notions began to form in his mind: no commands to be obeyed by a simple-minded dot, but curiosity about the manner in which the computer was reading his mind. And the answer was inside his head: the cap, with its trailing wires, was a sophisticated encephalograph that recorded his brain waves; the computer then compared them with a vast store of similar waves in its memory.

  Vast? he wondered, and an image of a clenched fist appeared in his mind. Grains of sand trickled from the fist. The view, like a camera, pulled back to show grains piling up over the centuries, and then centuries of centuries, to form vast beaches and great deserts, and the view pulled back and back until the grains began to separate and glow; and Gavin realized that he was looking at the night sky, not obscured by earth's atmosphere, but from above the veil of air, seeing the starry sky, the infinitely studded universe.

  He was in touch with the computer. The computer was putting the answers in his head, and it had answers for everything. A great comfort swept over him, and he wondered if this, too, were feedback, or merely the natural consequence of being connected to omniscience.

  Heaven, he thought, is being with God.

  The process accelerated. Thoughts flowed from Gavin's head to the computer and came back, reinforced with data and a cloud of consequences and derivations through which Gavin's mind moved with ease; thoughts seemed to come in turn from the computer and stimulate other thoughts in Gavin that were amplified and supported or subtly altered by the computer until Gavin lost track of whose thought was whose.