Kampus

by James Gunn

Gavin said to Elaine, “I think I heard something.”

  “What is it?” Elaine asked. “Let's move farther from the fire and listen.”

  “And then came Consciousness Three.”

  “Are we.”

  “Yes, we are Consciousness Three,

  sprouting from the stony soil

  of the American corporate state,

  from the promise that proved false,

  affluence,

  security,

  technology.

  “Consciousness Three made possible

  a new life,

  a new freedom,

  a new expansion of human possibility.

  “Consciousness Three accepts itself:

  'I'm glad I'm me.’

  'Whatever I am I am.’

  “To those who have glimpsed

  the real possibilities of life,

  tasted liberation and love,

  seen the promised land,

  a dreary corporate job,

  a ranchhouse life,

  a miserable death in war,

  is utterly intolerable;

  the thought of what is

  and what could be is overwhelming.

  “The promise of America,

  land of beauty and abundance,

  land of the free,

  had been betrayed.

  “And Consciousness Three emerged with its message:

  Thou shalt not do violence to thyself.

  People are brothers.

  No one judges anyone else.

  No one stands above the crowd.

  No one uses another person.

  No one gives commands nor follows them,

  Nor observes duties after the feeling is gone.

  “To Consciousness Three all has been revealed:

  an unjust society

  run for the benefit of the privileged few,

  lacking in proclaimed democracy and liberty,

  ugly,

  artificial,

  unhealthy for children and other living things.”

  “It sounds like people moving around out there somewhere,” Gavin said.

  “Put on your headbands and your jeans,

  and show what revolution means.

  “For we are Consciousness Three.”

  “Are we!”

  “We are Consciousness Three.”

  Almost as the echoes of the ballads were still returning from the surrounding hills, while Reich still held his dramatic pose upon the makeshift stage, a woman screamed in the darkness beyond the firelight and Billie ran into the circle of light. She was naked to the waist, and her face and hands were smeared with blood.

  “Help!” she shouted. “Help me! It's Pa. He's killed those two fellows with a knife, and he's fixing to kill me too, if he can.”

  At the sound of the first scream, the people around the fire were on their feet, and as Billie appeared with her message of vengeance, they turned in different directions to flee. Before they could separate, lights blazed from every side of the camp. People froze where they stood, like jacklighted deer.

  From out of the darkness beyond the lights came a man's reasonable voice. “This here group's been found a conspiracy, and it has got to be broke up. Do not resist, and no damage will be done.”

  “What do you mean ‘no damage'?” Reich called. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “Nothing much,” said the reasonable voice. “You're going to be split up is all, and the government is going to see that you keep split up. If you don't, the next step is deportation.”

  “Where to?” Reich asked, looking around him at the men and women his song had praised, as if he could not bear to think of the group being scattered. “Europe? Asia? Latin America?”

  “Mars,” the voice replied, and chuckled. “See if you can get by there without working.”

  “Come on,” Elaine said softly, and tugged at Gavin's hand. Keeping low, they began crawling between the outer rings of lights.

  Behind them Gavin could hear the camp explode with movement as the members of Reich's tribe threw themselves toward the lights. But bombs exploded in the air, and something sweet and enervating, like the odor of lotus blossoms, came to Gavin. By this time they were past the lights and scrambling into the darkness.

  Gavin looked back once and saw Reich, defiant to the end, sinking onto his platform like the Statue of Liberty melting from the bottom up.

  A few hundred yards into the night, Gavin collapsed into an irrigation ditch. He dragged Elaine down beside him. They lay huddled together. Gavin could feel Elaine's heart bumping against his chest. They listened to the sounds of bodies being methodically loaded into vehicles, like sides of beef.

  “Have we got them all?” someone called.

  Elaine shivered in Gavin's arms.

  “According to my count, we're missing one.”

  “Say, I just stumbled across a couple guys in this field. They had their throats cut wide open.”

  “Then we're one over.”

  “Here's a wild man with a long beard and a bloody knife who says these people stole his food and his daughter.”

  “If one of these is his daughter, then the numbers check out. Bring the old guy along. We'll take care of his problem in the morning.”

  Slowly the sounds became infrequent. With a burst of activity, a new caravan pulled away from the camp. After its passage diminished in the distance, silence settled back upon the land as if it had never been disturbed since eternity began.

  “You see, Gavin,” the Professor said, “the forces of Apollo prevail, as they always have. Even when the chaos of Dionysus seems victorious, it is only momentary. Order creeps back; civilization returns; day replaces night...”

  Gavin held Elaine in his arms all night long and never once thought of anything but the cold.

  10. The Place at the Top of the World

  Ever since the Industrial Revolution began reshaping the nature of human existence, romantic fools have been urging humanity to shut down the machines—forcibly, if necessary—and return to the simpler, more natural ways of our ancestors. How else, they ask, can we throw off the poisons of civilization, restore the natural vigor of our bodies, prevent the pollution of our water and our air, and eliminate the neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses which afflict technological man? We must return to nature, they say. Nature! What is natural to man? And I tell you that knowledge is more human than ignorance, science is as human as art, and only technology can prevent pollution and preserve us from extinction. Without technology, man is at the mercy of nature, and nature is not kind. Man's natural condition, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out, is poor, short, nasty, and brutish. But more important than man's condition is his potential: he has only one chance for immortality as he starts up the ladder of technology. At a certain stage in his development, he has used up his capital—the fossil fuels—and he must climb the next step to the inexhaustible resources of solar power and thermonuclear energy, or fall all the way to the bottom, perhaps never to rise again.

  —THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK

  Gavin woke up shivering in his sleeping bag. For a disoriented moment he didn't know where he was, and then he felt under his back the hard reality of the mountain and he felt in his lungs the thin, cold air, and he remembered how they had arrived at this desolate spot in a desolate world.

  It was later than he thought. The sun had climbed up as high as the mountains to the east of them. Gavin felt as if he were peering out of a shark's mouth past great jagged rows of teeth crowding in one behind another.

  He looked over at Elaine, still asleep in her sleeping bag; her head was ducked into the bag, and he could see only her hair. But he knew her face so well now that it was almost like seeing it.

  They had come a long way together across the country. Since Taos it had been either deserts or mountains with towns like oases in their midst. And now they had arrived at this spot on this mountainside so barren, so useless, so isolated that it might never have known the pre
sence of man. And still she would not let him touch her; even for warmth, she would not share his sleeping bag.

  If they did not find the pass through these mountains soon, it would not matter. Their packaged food had been eaten for supper and their water was almost gone, and Gavin was afraid that they were lost. They had been wandering in these mountains for days, and every valley led only to another peak.

  Everywhere around them was gray, dead rock, cold, hard, and unforgiving.

  Ruefully, Gavin thought that they should have stayed on the road with their electric cycles, but experience had made them cautious. When they heard approaching them the strange discordant melodies of a religious procession, they had turned off the highway onto a convenient trail. It led up a valley, always climbing into the mountains. But the procession had followed; when the path ended in tumbled rock, they had to abandon their cycles and proceed on foot, always just a little in front of the procession.

  Later they found a bearded man dying on a cross on a hilltop. He was exalted by revelation or drugs or approaching death, and he cursed them in Spanish when they took him down. But they stayed with him anyway until he was dead, and they buried him at the foot of the cross under some rocks.

  In the last mountain village they had been told about strange people in the mountains. Some were mystics like the ones who sought a new messiah among those who passed their way, for someone who would die for their sins and be reborn. Others ... well, the villagers didn't know, but they thought magicians lived high in the mountains—in the place at the top of the world.

  Gavin and Elaine sipped hot chocolate at a table outside a little adobe café while dark-skinned children looked wonder at their cycles, and they speculated whether either of the stories was true. Now one had been proven.

  By then they were lost. They were afraid the religious group would return and ask one of them to replace their lost messiah on the cross. They tried to retrace their steps and found they could not remember which ways they had turned. They searched for trails that would lead them back down to the broad highway that led across Nevada into California, but each trail ended in the mountains, and when they paused sometimes they thought they could hear the strange chanting of the religious group. Perhaps it was only the wind.

  Gavin slid out of the sleeping bag. The experience north of Taos had warned them of the possibility of being declared a conspiracy, and they had worked for a month in Albuquerque to buy sleeping bags and warm clothing, and for another two weeks to make down payments on the cycles. On the cycles the end of the journey had seemed just over the next rise in the road.

  He stood up, fully clothed, pulled the sleeping bag around his shoulders for warmth, and walked to the far side of the ledge where they had stopped when the dark had caught them. With the sun behind his shoulder, Gavin looked over the edge of the hill.

  He stood at the top of a cliff that dropped away steeply several thousand feet, at least. Far below, scree marked where sections of the cliff had broken away over the millennia. But that was not what stopped him there upon the mountain, one hand clutched to a jutting rock for support. He looked down upon a sea of fire.

  The valley below burned with a white flame. There was no smoke, no heat that Gavin could feel. But as far as he could see, the valley blazed with light such as God must have created when He said, “Let there be light!” In the focus of that empyrean, Gavin felt his body burning, charring, shriveling, his grosser parts smoking away, leaving only the purified essence of what he was.

  He stood at the topmost reach of that great spiritual conflagration and felt as if all the blind, creative forces in the universe were centered in his body, making him whole again, reuniting him with everyone and everything else, and he trembled on the brink of great revelations.

  “What is it?” Elaine asked behind him.

  “I don't know,” Gavin said, “but I think it's a sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  “I don't know,” he said again. “Death maybe. Maybe something even more wonderful.”

  The mountains which held this miraculous sea had been transformed from gray rock into a silver chalice for a god's transubstantiated blood.

  And as they watched, the sea of flame dulled, faded, and became a vast dark array of small mechanical devices made apparently of metal and glass. They covered the valley floor as far as Gavin could see, except right at the base of the cliff, where white desert sand or alkali came up to the fallen rock.

  “They're solar-energy cells,” Gavin said.

  “I knew they had them all over Death Valley,” Elaine said, “but we're hundreds of miles east of there.”

  “And there the arrays are set in a fixed framework. Here they follow the sun, and from the looks of that desert, they get sun every day.”

  Even though the sea of flame had been explained as the reflection of the morning sun from a million solar cells, the experience lost none of its magic for Gavin. He still was shaken by the vision, still felt it working upon him, burning out the dross, refining what was left into something truer, something more essentially himself.

  The day of miracles had just begun. Out of a place near the scree where the cells began, where the sea of flame had lapped at the cliff, a figure rose from the desert floor into the air, lifting from the sand like an angel ascending into heaven. As the figure got closer, it seemed even more angelic, unisexed and beautiful in a silver suit, with a glittering halo above its head.

  Gavin stared at the incredible figure as it climbed to eye level, not thinking to move back into the shelter of the rocks or to conceal himself. Even when he saw that the halo above the angel's head actually was counterrotating blades which drew the creature up into the sky like the rotors of a helicopter, he did not move. He felt Elaine's hand creep into his, and he stared into the face of the creature, who looked back at him and then moved close enough to stand beside him on the cliff edge. The blast from the propellers whipped dust from the rocks, made them the center of a small whirlwind, although the blades themselves were almost silent. The fabulous figure in front of them open its hand; the blades stopped turning.

  The angel was a young man in a one-piece silver suit. A framework that fit tightly to his body supported the horizontal propellers on a short post. “Hello,” the young man said in a normal, pleasant voice. “You're out here where nowhere meets the sky.”

  Gavin found himself unable to speak for a moment. Then he said, “I'm afraid we're lost.”

  “No food either, I'd guess,” the young man said, looking at their flat packs. “Come along with me, and I'll take you where you can get some food and shelter.”

  Gavin continued to look at him.

  “You're probably curious about my gear,” the young man said. “That layout below is an experimental power system—several times as efficient as ordinary solar cells—but hard to service because they're hard to reach. So I use this contraption to get around. The uniform is also an experiment. Very effective insulation against cold or heat.”

  “Very effective, too,” Gavin said, “at dazzling the locals. I've never seen anything like that uniform or that lifting device.”

  “I guess we do get some stories started,” the young man said. He laughed. “And this ‘lifting device’ we call a levitator. Not really a levitator, of course. It's electric; works by broadcast power. But it's better than a personal helicopter, we think.”

  The young man's openness was appealing, but Gavin still hesitated. “Where is it you want to take us?”

  The young man undid some fastenings on his chest and shed the framework supporting the levitator. He held it easily in one hand. “We have a place just up the hill,” he said. “I've been down repairing the cable to the solar cells. It gets cut now and then by rock slides.” He went to Elaine's sleeping bag. “Come on. Let's get you packed up.”

  After a moment's hesitation, Gavin went to his own bag, folded it into a compact double handful, and stuffed it into his pack. When he was finished, Elaine already had pu
t on her pack and was ready to start. The young man was smiling at her. Gavin felt a flash of annoyance that vanished as the young man turned and smiled equally warmly at him.

  “Let's go,” he said, and he picked up his levitator, braced it against one shoulder, and started up a rocky slope on the other side from the cliff edge.

  Gavin shouldered his pack and started after him.

  They climbed for several thousand feet, once over a snow field and once through a flurry of snowflakes. The young man did not breathe deeply, nor seem concerned, and he led them, without hesitation, over rocks and snow and through the semidarkness of the falling snow, occasionally turning to smile encouragement or lend them a hand over a difficult spot.

  Gavin would have felt irritated by the continual receding of their destination if he had not reflected that their guide was walking when he could have flown.

  “How much farther is it?” Gavin asked at last.

  “Not much farther now,” he was told.

  But it was farther, and by the time they reached a dark cleft in the rocks, Gavin was breathing in gasps from the exertion and the altitude, and the muscles in his legs were trembling from the strain of the long climb. It was a relief to walk level again, even though the cleft closed ominously overhead, and only the glimmer of their guide's silver suit led them through the darkness of what was now a cave or a tunnel. Under their feet, however, the surface was remarkably smooth.

  “Are you sure you know where you're going?” Gavin asked.

  “He acts sure,” Elaine said.

  “Sure,” the cheerful word floated back to them.

  In the dark their trip seemed to take even longer.

  Finally the silver suit in front of them seemed to grow brighter, to begin, almost, to radiate. Then they turned a corner and Gavin saw that light was entering at the far end and reflecting off the uniform. Now that sunlight at the end of the cave was streaming toward them, the silver suit began to fade again, and then, as the opening grew close, it disappeared.

  Gavin came to the mouth of the cave and stopped.

  He felt Elaine beside him, but he did not look at her. In front of him, in a sort of natural valley sheltered in what seemed to be the crater of an extinct volcano, with the diminishing and darkening peaks of the Rockies behind the crater rim on every side, was a great white building surrounded by smaller buildings, and all set in an ordered garden of greenery and color. There were trees and shrubs and flowers, and surrounding the central garden were fields with vegetables and fruit growing in them. The odor of green things came to them in a warm, scented breeze. It was like a vision of Paradise, and Gavin looked around for the flaming sword, or the guards that were its modern equivalent. There were none.