by James Gunn
He felt as if he were losing his identity. No, that wasn't it. He felt as if his identity were expanding to include not only his body and those organs and vessels and memories and thoughts contained within it, but the metal and plastic standing against the far wall with its tiny magnetic fluxes tickling the synapses of microcircuits, with its purposeful electrons seeking the shortest pathway through its supercooled body. He was no longer just Gavin, but Gavin plus the computer, Gavin and the computer, Gavin-computer, Gavputer...
His brain was as big as the entire room, filled with neurons and stacked circuits, and ideas and memories, and inputs and data against which to check them, and extrapolations with which to extend them into infinity, and he was God. It was like having the Professor as part of him but a million times more powerful.
He felt himself reaching, straining for comprehension, struggling for real omniscience, not just omniscience limited by the data incorporated into the machine through the fallible measurements and recordings of man, not even omniscience limited by the direct samplings from the natural world by the computer itself, but omniscience that knew not just what had been thought but what was true—whatever was understood by whatever might be, the universe as creation.
His desire for knowledge mounted intolerably, interminably, infinitely—and he broke through, savagely, victoriously, into great warm ecstatic depths and heights and breadths, into great new dimensions of knowledge, each with its unique sweetness and fulfillment; he expanded tumescently to fill the universe, desire and satisfaction coexistent, concept and creation simultaneous; he was one with the universe, flowing into it, permeating it, impregnating it, while it became him, surrendering, responding, rejoicing...
He was God the Creator.
And he created the universe. He created heaven and earth...
And he died. The stars went out. The universe went dark. God died. In a process swifter than thought, the vast and subtle substance that had been the Creator diminished, dwindled, shrank, shriveled through the black nothingness that had been the universe, back into galactic dimensions, stellar scope, planetary volume, and finally, contracting faster than the speed of light, once more into a prison of flesh, and he was isolated, alone, cut off, solitary, condemned....
Gavin opened his eyes and looked up into the concerned face of Elaine. “You turned me off,” he said. It was more of an accusation than a statement.
“A few minutes more and you would have been lost for good,” she said. “Our instructor in computer school told us about renegade setups like this, which bypass the essential feedback filters. Oh, they're all right for pragmatists like Sally, who use them for their own little tricks, but Sally doesn't know what they can do to someone with imagination and no experience. You could have become incurably paranoid, maybe even catatonic.”
“I want to go back,” Gavin said stubbornly, feeling for the switch on the side of the couch.
Elaine caught his wrist, and he was too weak to struggle.
“You think that now,” Elaine said, “but give yourself some time to get a perspective, to realize what you're getting and what you're giving up. Right this moment, we've got to get away. I've stolen a car. While you're here, close, you'll find it difficult to think objectively. Come with me now, and tomorrow, if you still want this, I'll bring you back.”
“Sally's waiting for me,” Gavin said.
“She'll still be waiting for you tomorrow.”
Gavin allowed himself to be helped down the stairs, his knees curiously weak, and into an electric car, and, reclining wearily on the seat beside Elaine, to be driven silently through the night away from Denver, and back into a world he never made.
9. Deflowered Children
Man's instincts are polygamous. His instincts are living fossils from the paleolithic, when men hunted large, dangerous animals, and frequently were killed. The job of the remaining males was to fertilize any available females; the females, as security for the survival of the tribe, had remained in the relative safety of the cave. Virility and instant sexual readiness became survival characteristics; no doubt they are responsible for our presence here. We are the children of the strong, the fertile, and the lustful—and perhaps of the occasional fox who hung back from the hunt or malingered around the cave. The development of agriculture and the domestication of animals made such polygamous instincts unnecessary, and large families have been counterproductive since the Industrial Revolution. But all of this has not affected the persistence of our early characteristics. After all, we were savages for a million years, farmers for only twenty thousand, civilized for less than seven thousand, and industrialized for only a couple of hundred.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
The night was a womb through which they passed like blind possibilities down a crooked tunnel, unfertilized potentials, unripe gods. The headlights led them through the dark. No other cars were on the road, and the sky existed only on faith above the clouds. They were alone, the two of them, with the night.
Toward morning Gavin resurrected himself. “Where are we going?”
“South,” Elaine said. “Toward Colorado Springs. And beyond.”
“I wanted to go west.”
“We're taking an alternate route. I heard George say that the mountains had been snowed in by a blizzard. I thought we should go a more southern way over the Rockies.”
Gavin nodded. He really didn't care anymore. Perhaps someday he would care again.
“Do you want to go back?” Elaine asked.
“Back?” A spasm shook Gavin's body like the anticipation of ecstasy. Then his body stiffened. “No,” he said. And then, more softly, “No. No.”
Elaine did not ask him for reasons. Gavin didn't know what he would have said if she had asked, but he knew that he did not want to go back, any more than a man named Jesus would have wanted to be born again. To become a god by accident is one thing, but to choose to be a god is another: the frail vessel of flesh was not meant to contain the corrosive fluid of omnipotence.
What had it all been but a kind of wet dream?
Gavin breathed deeply and felt himself slowly begin to care.
A few minutes later the sky began to lighten in front of them. “I thought you were driving south,” Gavin said.
“I am.”
“Then why is the sun coming up in that direction?”
Elaine didn't have an answer.
The sky continued to brighten ahead; the clouds turned red. The next moment, Gavin knew what it was: not the sun, but a fire, and a big fire, casting lurid reflections against the clouds.
A few miles farther and the fire was raging in the field beside the road, a gigantic bonfire with tiny black figures capering in front of it like sticks drawn to the flames, soon to cast themselves into it. As they watched, parts of the sticks were tossed into the fire.
Elaine pulled the car off the road onto the shoulder.
The blaze was a fascinating display of capricious power. Inrushing gusts of wind and bursts of fuel changed the colors of the flames through all the variations between yellow and red. Barbarous tongues licked at the sky, and fiery throats belched sparks high into the air, where they drifted with the wind or fell dying to the earth.
Gavin could see now that the figures were smaller and thinner than they ought to be, like people seen darkly through funhouse mirrors, and he realized that they were children. They were standing around the fire as if worshiping its beauty and its power, dancing around it like idolators before some pagan god, or breaking away into the darkness for another long piece of wood or splintered board to toss upon the flames.
“Where are they getting the wood?” Elaine asked.
“I think they're tearing up fenceposts, and it looks as if there's a barn or farmhouse back there.”
“Destructive little monsters,” Elaine said.
Gavin shrugged. “Anytime you create something new, chances are you're destroying something old.”
“I hope the people who built those f
ences and barns are as philosophical about it.”
“A good man once called something like this the unavoidable and ultimately beneficial response of urban kids to the sudden release of open country.”
“Beneficial to whom?” Elaine asked.
“To them. To society.”
“And how about those whose efforts to build something get wasted?”
“The same philosopher said, ‘There is plenty of fuel for celebration for a long time when laborious people have for several generations been accumulating it in fences and houses.'” But Gavin thought he could hear the Professor say, “Some people build because they must, and others destroy because they cannot build.”
“They're coming this way!” Elaine said.
Gavin could see now that several dark figures were approaching the fence, silhouetted against the fire, crouching between the barbs of the wire fence that separated the field from the highway. Behind, more dark figures were streaming into a river of movement between the fence and the flames, like ants following a pheromone trail toward some marvelous bit of carrion.
“Let's get out of here!” Gavin said suddenly.
“What?”
“Get the car moving! Don't argue!”
“They're only children!” Elaine said.
“They want the car!”
Elaine started the car moving, but now bodies stood in front of it, hands linked, eyes blinking into the headlights. The children were about ten years old; they were both boys and girls, dressed neatly in shirts and pants and jackets of various colors. Their faces were white; their eyes seemed to glow like the eyes of cats.
Elaine stopped the car when the front bumper touched the row of bodies.
“Too late,” Gavin said. “Get out. Quickly. Quietly.”
Elaine edged out her side of the car, and Gavin followed, pushing her away from the car into the road and then into the ditch on the other side, away from the bonfire, away from the children. Silently the children climbed into the car and on top of it and onto the rear bumper. The car lunged down the highway, then made a tight turn that brought it back toward the ditch where Gavin and Elaine stood. Gavin pulled Elaine down, but the car swerved and turned away toward the fence.
The barbed wire parted and whirred through the air like whips as the car surged into the field, across grass and corn stubble. Children leaped from the car on either side as it lunged into the heart of the bonfire. In a moment it began to smolder, and then tongues of fire licked along the painted roof, the upholstery began to blaze, and metal and insulation turned the ascending flames green and blue and smoky black...
They walked along the dark highway for a couple of miles, by Gavin's estimate, before they saw lighted windows off to the right. They crawled between strands of barbed wire and trudged across a plowed field, clods crumbling under their feet, until they reached a dirt road. They followed the road until they reached a tall fence built of stones and concrete and broken glass haphazardly mixed together by some cruel and determined hand.
“Someone doesn't want company,” Gavin said.
“Maybe we should take a hint,” Elaine said.
“They can't refuse us shelter and a little food. No one is that savage.”
“What about the children?”
“Children are always savages.”
After a few hundred feet they came to a gate in the fence. It faced north, toward the fire. The gate was solid and wooden, topped with barbed wire, like the gate to a stockade, but it was open a little, swinging gently on huge hinges, as if someone had come through it in a hurry and forgotten to shut it behind. The distant flames painted the door red, like blood.
Gavin pushed against the gate. The gap widened. “Come on,” he said.
“I think we're making a mistake,” Elaine said.
“Nonsense.”
Inside the gate, the road still was dirt, but it was well kept and rutless, and the edges were outlined by a border of whitewashed rocks. The sky had begun to gray in the east, and by the faint light of dawn they could see neat lawn, which in this climate implied irrigation, and beyond, the beginnings of plowed fields, dark and fertile, waiting for seed and water to turn them green.
The smell of dust was in the air and, more distantly, the smell of fire.
The first building they approached was a white barn. It was big and sturdy, with a gambrel roof dark overhead, and a wide doorway, big enough for a car or a wagon, open like a black mouth to the road. Gavin could hear cattle moving restlessly inside and complaining. As they reached the doorway, Gavin saw a light at the far end of the barn; he nodded at Elaine and stepped inside the barn onto straw.
The smell of the straw and warm cattle and dung came to his nostrils like curdled air, and he breathed it in deeply, identifying the place by its odors as surely as if he had spent all his life on a farm. Over the sounds of the cattle moving around in their stalls, Gavin heard a thin, tinny sound. The light came dimly from a lantern hung or placed on a distant wall. Gavin walked toward it, down the center of the barn, Elaine behind him, between the rows of stalls, each with its cow, jaws working or udder sagging.
As they neared the far end of the barn, Gavin could see that the lantern was hung on a nail. The sound became louder. It was the noise of something hitting the side of a metal bucket. Gavin smelled warm milk. He was not surprised to see a head pressed into the black-and-white flank of a cow and two sturdy forearms thrust under the cow squirting milk in long, alternate streams into a bucket. The bucket was nearly full; the milk frothed near the top.
“That looks very skillful,” Gavin said, and the milker leaped up from the stool, almost upsetting the bucket of milk.
The milker was a girl. She was young, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and pretty, with a milkmaid's complexion, blond hair braided and knotted behind her head, surprised blue eyes, and a full-breasted figure. She seemed not only surprised but alarmed.
“We're just strangers off the road,” Gavin said. “We didn't mean to startle you.”
“We thought you might have a bite for us to eat, and maybe a bed or some straw for us to sleep in,” Elaine added. “We've been driving since Denver, but some children took our car and burned it. I know that sounds ridiculous...”
“So that's where Pa went so early this morning,” the girl said in a clear, pleasant voice. She looked at Elaine, and then, with more interest, at Gavin. “I wouldn't be here when he gets back if I was you.”
“Surely he wouldn't begrudge us a little food,” Gavin said reasonably.
“He'd begrudge you being here,” the girl said. “This is Pa's land, and he's the only man around, or ever was, or ever he wants to be.”
“Come on, Gavin,” Elaine said. “There must be other farms around, and they all can't be so unfriendly.”
“She's telling you true, mister, about leaving, that is,” the girl said, “though you've got a good walk ahead of you. Pa owns all the land for ten miles in any direction. That's why he's up north. If those damned kids are back, burning up his fences and barns...”
“We're staying until we get something to eat,” Gavin said stubbornly.
“Well,” the girl said, smiling a bit now, “if you won't be warned, I'll take you up to the house, but you'll have to move quick if Pa gets here before you're through.” She picked up the bucket of milk and started down the length of the barn, carrying it with the skill of long experience so that the milk didn't slop over the edge.
“Let me help you,” Gavin said.
She looked at him sideways, her head tilted, and said, “I'm used to it.”
She seemed strong enough, Gavin thought, with her big hands and forearms and broad shoulders. Her legs, though, were slender under a full skirt.
They followed her up a path beside the road until they reached a big white farmhouse. It was two stories tall, and it had a broad screened porch that went across the front of the house and down the side and around to the back, where the girl led them.
Gavin held the screen door
open. The girl put down her bucket by the door and turned to them. “I'm Billie,” she said. “Mary-Jo'll be by the stove, and I'll introduce you to the others.”
She opened the kitchen door, picked up her bucket, and carried it into the bright, steamy kitchen. Gavin followed. The kitchen was a big room, filled with stoves and refrigerators and washers and other kinds of equipment, and people. All the people were women and children. All of them looked alike. The women were tall, blond, and buxom; they all looked like Billie. And the children were small and blond, all like each other and the women, too.
Actually, when Gavin came to count them, there were only seven women and five children, two of the children infants, one of them suckling at the breast of a mother seated at a big round oak table; she was eating cereal and cream from a bowl. They all looked up, surprised, when Gavin and Elaine entered.
“These is two strangers who come to the barn looking for food and a place to rest,” Billie said. “Their car got took and burned by the kids up north. That's Mary-Jo by the stove. This is Sarah and June and Maxine and Frieda and Gertrude and Millie.”
“I'm Gavin,” he said, feeling strange among all these almost identical women, like an untested bull in a herd of heifers. “This is Elaine.”
The woman stirring a kettle at the black stove looked at them solemnly. “You don't belong here. You better git before Pa gets back. He be mighty put out. No telling what he might do he find you here. And, Billie, you git back to the milking. Pa, he finds the cows ain't milked, he might take his belt to you.”
Billie shrugged and poured the bucket into a large milk can made of gleaming stainless steel. “I know what Pa's belt is like, and I ain't afraid of it like some of you.” But she started back out the door with her bucket.
