Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  He didn’t admonish me. “Far enough that the water falling here never reaches the bottom.”

  We followed the narrow staircase, little more than a ridge projecting from the massive wall. The wall itself was layered, stone upon stone, forming bands of color that varied in height from no wider than my palm to taller than Doctor Bel. The stair we walked had been chipped free of the wall, I could see how that the edge of the path was even with the wall above, and we walked in a niche carved out of the wall just wide enough to preserve our balance.

  The wounds in the old stone became fresher as we descended. The path became rougher, and the wall next to us showed tool marks. I wondered how old the path was; it seemed that it could easily have taken an age to complete in itself.

  At seemingly random points along the path, holes had been chiseled into the stones of the wall. Often these portals were the size of a dinner plate, barely wide enough to allow Doctor Bel to insert his pipe to see what was beyond—an impulse he never indulged in, so I perceived nothing beyond the dark pits other than a sense of a wider, unseen space beyond.

  Two holes we passed were large enough that, as Doctor Bel passed, I caught glimpses of what lay within.

  Within the first, I could glimpse a giant metal sarcophagus, inlaid with gold and jewels. If it was a crypt, as it first appeared to me, it was one for someone twice the size of the largest man I had ever seen. What seemed to be the head, wrapped in abstract gold patterns, pointed down, at my feet, and the feet were lost above in the shadows of the Doctor’s lucernal pipe. It seemed to emerge from the stone itself, as if it was slowly sinking.

  We walked on and I saw no more.

  The second hole revealed a scene just as enigmatic. Beyond a hole as broad as I was, I could see a chamber a uniform gray in color. I saw pillars and arches of an unfamiliar design, mosaic floor in a twisted sun-burst pattern, the same monochrome gray, and windows and doorways that opened on gray ashy stone. Crouched on the floor in a position of supplication was the figure of a man, the same gray as the room.

  We moved on before I decided if the figure was a statue or the remains of some ancient citizen of Thalassus.

  We were so deep under the skin of Gaea now that I was unsure whether the remains I saw were from the great ancient city or from something even more ancient. Was he a contemporary of the men who dug this great shaft toward Gaea’s heart, or was he older?

  Doctor Bel stopped, and I had the brief thought that perhaps we had reached the bottom of the great shaft. We had not. We had only reached the end of the carved stairway. He stood on a flat area where a void had been carved in the side of the wall three times the distance I could span with my outstretched arms. The sudden opening and certain footing made it feel as if we suddenly stood in a cathedral the size of the Monad itself.

  When I walked into the space with him, Doctor Bel walked to the wall of the hand-carved chamber. He placed his hand on the rough-hewn wall, where the tool-marks were evident, and traced the bands of color. “Amazing, isn’t it? Each stratum its own lost century. A civilization’s rise and fall in a hand-span.” He spread his fingers wide. “I hold a millennium in my hand.”

  I wondered how many thousands of years we had descended.

  I saw a pile of digging tools sitting in the corner of the open space. “Doctor? Did you carve this path?”

  “My work is nearly complete.” He let go of his wall of time and turned toward me. “There is something you must see.”

  He was smiling again, and I found myself filled with an unaccountable dread. He took my arm and drew me toward the rear of the chamber, where I saw that it did not end. A crevice opened into a deeper chamber.

  For the first time, Doctor Bel had me lead the way.

  I saw nothing but darkness at first. I knew that my feet left stone and touched metal. And from the echoes I heard, I knew that I walked within a large space. Not until Doctor Bel followed with his pipe did I understand how large.

  As the lucernal metal washed its light by me, I could see a great ovoid dome supported by tapering gray-white ribs. The dome was made of faceted metal tiles that cast strange reflections. It was like nothing I had ever remembered seeing.

  But somehow, I knew it.

  “The destruction was so great, at first I believed nothing could survive.” Doctor Bel walked toward the center of the room. “Fragments of knowledge I found, written at five times remove, nothing . . . substantial.”

  I walked with him toward a raised dais at the center of the dome.

  “Is this familiar?” he asked.

  I shook my head, staring at what the ancients had wrought. “I have never seen men build something like this.” The faceted metal was under my feet, tiny hexagonal tiles that seemed to shimmer when the light-pipe illuminated them. How old to survive without tarnish, or anything more than a layer of stone dust.

  “Because men did not build it.” Doctor Bel climbed upon the dais, where a panel sat somewhere between a podium and an altar. “The greatest age man has seen created machines that thought, that lived, that built. This is their temple.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself. “What would a machine worship?”

  Doctor Bel lifted something off of the panel in front of him. He held it so it caught the light. One of the small metallic hexagons shimmered in his hand like a solidus.

  “This room is a ciborium of knowledge,” he said.

  I took a step back.

  “This wafer is a library unto itself, a thousand thousand volumes of ancient knowledge from when man and machine moved the heavens themselves.” He gestured to the curving metallic walls. “Surrounding us are a thousand thousand such libraries. This temple is consecrated to the preservation of all that was and could be known.”

  “How can that be so?” I began to feel the weight of Gaea above me. The weight of Thalassus. The weight of uncounted centuries.

  “Like any language. These words are written in the form of matter itself. Every particle within this wafer has meaning. It is solidified thought.” Doctor Bel looked at me as he stepped off the dais. He held the wafer toward me. “You remember nothing?”

  I took another step back. The doctor’s cylinder of lucernal metal shone on the panel where Doctor Bel had stood, casting his form into shadow before me. His wafer glittered in the light from behind him.

  I gestured weakly at the walls around me. “How can you read such a thing? A script you cannot see?”

  “This was not meant for human eyes. Like the tesserae of the Monad’s machinery, it is intended to be understood by a machine.” He held out the wafer. “Take it.”

  I did not. I could not.

  Instead, I shook my head and backed away from Doctor Bel in the direction of crevasse where we had entered. “I do not understand what you want from me.”

  “This temple survived the ages because those that built it intended it to be eternal. It has waited for us, for you and me, for thousands of centuries.”

  I shook my head. “Not me.”

  “A lifetime it took to find. Another lifetime to discover its meaning. Another lifetime to find you—”

  I turned and walked to the crevice. “You’re mistaken, Doctor. I am nothing, a courtesan, a madwoman. Such things are beyond me.”

  “Why then do you remember tales of the distant past so clearly?”

  I stopped on the threshold between metal and rock.

  “Why are your memories so fragmented, Geva?”

  “That is not my name.”

  “Long ago, they created machines indistinguishable from men. But they were not the same as men. They were better. They did not age, and they did not die.”

  “Stop it!”

  “But they did not foresee how long. The capacity to remember is finite. No being was made to remember so many eons.”

  I ran away from him, out toward the shaft. In the darkness I almost tumbled over the precipice. But my memory, fragmented as it was, was perfect in what it did recall. And I remembered how many st
eps it was before the floor fell away, and I stopped before my eyes adjusted to the faint light leaking from Doctor Bel’s ovoid temple.

  Doctor Bel’s strides were longer than my own, and I had a bare moment to contemplate the depths before me when his hand rested on my shoulder. He turned me around to face him.

  I faced a blacker shadow in the darkness, but somehow his wafer still glinted in my eyes.

  “You will listen to me!” The doctor’s voice was hard and cold now; the voice of the machines who had built the great temple. It was the voice of a soul that valued knowledge and nothing else.

  He pulled me away from the edge and held the wafer between us. “I brought you here to be the mother of a new age.”

  I tried to back away, but his grip was strong.

  “How else can one account for your survival? It is the will of what was known to become known again. History itself, all of past mankind, demands your presence here.”

  I looked at the wafer. I saw it shimmer in the dim light. I did have a memory, incomplete, a fragment of knowledge. I could take it, and I would know what it contained. Its knowledge would be come my knowledge, its memory would become my memory. It would become part of me. It might even heal my fractious memory, allow me a whole, continuous existence.

  Every one of those wafers, some ancient unnamed tutor had schooled me, held as much memory, or more, than was stored within my own mind.

  But what would it cost me?

  He pressed the wafer to my lips. “You were meant to consume this, understand it, make it speak again.”

  I thought of taking it. Service so long a part of my being that it took a supreme will not to simply acquiesce to a direct command immediately. But I knew it was my decision to make, not Doctor Bel’s.

  My mouth remained closed.

  What would it cost me?

  I knew what I was, and I knew that Doctor Bel meant to have me become someone else—something else. If I took what he held, and it held as wide and deep a meaning as I did myself, what would happen but I become half of what I was and half something else?

  And if I took another? Another? A thousand thousand? Would I become less a part of myself than a single brick was part of Thalassus itself?

  Doctor Bel pressed harder, trying to force my jaws open and the wafer past my lips. I felt it cut my lip, and where he held my shoulder, I could feel my flesh begin to bruise. “You were created for this! What other meaning could your existence have? You are not a random courtesan; you are a living relic. The most important being on Gaea, and with this gesture you could also become the most powerful.”

  What would I be, with all the knowledge of this past age? No longer a servant . . . a goddess, perhaps? No longer subject to the whims of the bureaucrats of the Monad. Not even subject to Doctor Bel any longer. Free.

  Free to be what?

  Free to do what?

  No longer me, what would I do with Doctor Bel’s knowledge? Would I create the idyll he dreamed of? Or would I still remember all the ills done to me? Would I be driven to complete the ancient war that tore Gaea’s sister from the heavens, the war that marked me as an abomination?

  “You will take this!” His voice had become shrill.

  I raised my hand and struck Doctor Bel. I do not remember any other time I had ever struck a human being. When my fist came down on his chest, I could feel bone give way. He staggered away, dropping his wafer and clutching himself where I had hit him. He gasped, an ugly liquid sound.

  There was enough light that I could see him stagger, but not enough that I could see his face. For that I was grateful.

  “You cursed creature.” He coughed up fluid that I could hear splash on the ground between us. He fell to his knees on the edge of the precipice. “The theologists are right. Do not bring life to the unliving . . .”

  He toppled over to the side, and I do not know if his strength failed or if he deliberately fell toward the darkness. But as I watched, still frozen in shock at the strength of the blow I had delivered, Doctor Bel tumbled silently into the pit.

  I do not choose to remember how long I stood there, but eventually I returned to the temple to retrieve his lucernal pipe. During my long walk back to the surface I spared little time to worry what would become of me.

  After all, in my long memory, there has always been a place in the world for madwomen and courtesans.