Frost and Fire

by Roger Zelazny

  All of which is preamble to stating my belief that Kit was at least partly mad. But he was no Gothic Christ. An Electronic Buddha would be much closer.

  “Does the data-net have the Buddha-nature?” he asked me one day.

  “Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t everything?” Then I saw the look in his eyes and added, “How the hell should I know?”

  He grunted then and reclined his resonance couch, lowered the induction helmet, and continued his computer-augmented analysis of a Lucifer cipher with a 128-bit key. Theoretically, it would take thousands of years to crack it by brute force, but the answer was needed within two weeks. His nervous system coupled with the data-net, he was able to deliver.

  I did not notice his breathing patterns for some time. It was not until later that I came to realize that after he had finished his work, he would meditate for increasingly long periods of time while still joined with the system.

  When I realized this, I chided him for being too lazy to turn the thing off.

  He smiled.

  “The flow,” he said. “You do not fixate at one point. You go with the flow.”

  “You could throw the switch before you go with the flow and cut down on our electric bill.”

  He shook his head, still smiling.

  “But it is that particular flow that I am going with. I am getting farther and farther into it. You should try it sometime. There have been moments when I felt I could translate myself into it.”

  “Linguistically or theologically?”

  “Both,” he replied.

  And one night he did indeed go with the flow. I found him in the morning—sleeping, I thought—in his resonance couch, the helmet still in place. This time, at least, he had shut down our terminal. I let him rest. I had no idea how late he might have been working. By evening, though, I was beginning to grow concerned and I tried to rouse him. I could not. He was in a coma.

  Later, in the hospital, he showed a flat EEG. His breathing had grown extremely shallow, his blood pressure was very low, his pulse feeble. He continued to decline during the next two days. The doctors gave him every test they could think of but could determine no cause for his condition. In that he had once signed a document requesting that no heroic measures be taken to prolong his existence should something irreversible take him, he was not hooked up to respirators and pumps and IVs after his heart had stopped beating for the fourth time. The autopsy was unsatisfactory. The death certificate merely showed: “Heart stoppage. Possible cerebrovascular accident.” The latter was pure speculation. They had found no sign of it. His organs were not distributed to the needy as he had once requested, for fear of some strange new virus which might be transmitted.

  Kit, like Marley, was dead to begin with.

  15. Mt. Fuji from Tsukudajima in Edo

  Blue sky, a few low clouds, Fuji across the bay’s bright water, a few boats and an islet between us. Again, dismissing time’s changes, I find considerable congruence with reality. Again, I sit within a small boat. Here, however, I’ve no desire to dive beneath the waves in search of sunken splendor or to sample the bacteria-count with my person.

  My passage to this place was direct and without incident. Preoccupied I came. Preoccupied I remain. My vitality remains high. My health is no worse. My concerns also remain the same, which means that my major question is still unanswered.

  At least I feel safe out here on the water. “Safe,” though, is a relative term. “Safer” then, than I felt ashore and passing among possible places of ambush. I have not really felt safe since that day after my return from the hospital… .

  I was tired when I got back home, following several sleepless nights. I went directly to bed. I did not even bother to note the hour, so I have no idea how long I slept.

  I was awakened in the dark by what seemed to be the ringing of the telephone. Sleepily, I reached for the instrument, then realized that it was not actually ringing. Had I been dreaming? I sat up in bed. I rubbed my eyes. I stretched. Slowly, the recent past filled my mind and I knew that I would not sleep again for a time. A cup of tea, I decided, might serve me well now. I rose, to go to the kitchen and heat some water.

  As I passed through the work area, I saw that one of the CRTs for our terminal was lit. I could not recall its having been on but I moved to turn it off.

  I saw then that its switch was not turned on. Puzzled, I looked again at the screen and for the first time realized that there was a display present:

  MARI.

  ALL IS WELL

  I AM TRANSLATED.

  USE THE COUCH AND THE HELMET.

  KIT

  I felt my fingers digging into my cheeks and my chest was tight from breath retained. Who had done this? How? Was it perhaps some final delirious message left by Kit himself before he went under?

  I reached out and flipped the ON-OFF switch back and forth several times, leaving it finally in the OFF position.

  The display faded but the light remained on. Shortly, a new display was flashed upon the screen:

  YOU READ ME. GOOD.

  IT IS ALL RIGHT. I LIVE.

  I HAVE ENTERED THE DATA-NET.

  SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.

  I WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.

  I ran from the room. In the bathroom I threw up, several times. Then I sat upon the toilet, shaking. Who would play such a horrible joke upon me? I drank several glasses of water and waited for my trembling to subside.

  When it had, I went directly to the kitchen, made the tea, and drank some. My thoughts settled slowly into the channels of analysis. I considered possibilities. The one that seemed more likely than most was that Kit had left a message for me and that my use of the induction interface gear would trigger its delivery. I wanted that message, whatever it might be, but I did not know whether I possessed sufficient emotional fortitude to receive it at the moment.

  I must have sat there for the better part of an hour. I looked out the window once and saw that the sky was growing light. I put down my cup. I returned to the work area.

  The screen was still lit. The message, though, had changed:

  DO NOT BE AFRAID.

  SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.

  THEN YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.

  I crossed to the couch. I sat on it and reclined it. I lowered the helmet. At first there was nothing but field noise.

  Then I felt his presence, a thing difficult to describe in a world customarily filled only with data flows. I waited. I tried to be receptive to whatever he had somehow left imprinted for me.

  “I am not a recording, Man,” he seemed to say to me then. “I am really here.”

  I resisted the impulse to flee. I had worked hard for this composure and I meant to maintain it.

  “I made it over,” he seemed to say. “I have entered the net. I am spread out through many places. It is pure kundalini. I am nothing but flow. It is wonderful. I will be forever here. It is nirvana.”

  “It really is you,” I said.

  “Yes. I have translated myself. I want to show you what it means.”

  “Very well.”

  “I am gathered here now. Open the legs of your mind and let me in fully.”

  I relaxed and he flowed into me. Then I was borne away and I understood.

  16. Mt. Fuji from Umezawa

  Fuji across lava fields and wisps of fog, drifting clouds; birds on the wing and birds on the ground. This one at least is close. I lean on my staff and stare at his peaceful reaches across the chaos. The lesson is like that of a piece of music: I am strengthened in some fashion I cannot describe.

  And I had seen blossoming cherry trees on the way over here, and fields purple with clover, cultivated fields yellow with rape-blossoms, grown for its oil, a few winter camellias still holding forth their reds and pinks, the green shoots of rice beds, here and there a tulip tree dashed with white, blue mountains in the distance, foggy river valleys. I had passed villages where colored sheet metal now covers the roofs’ thatching—blue and ye
llow, green, black, red— and yards filled with the slate-blue rocks so fine for landscape gardening; an occasional cow, munching, lowing softly; scarlike rows of plastic-covered mulberry bushes where the silkworms are bred. My heart jogged at the sights—the tiles, the little bridges, the color. … It was like entering a tale by Lafcadio Hearn, to have come back.

  My mind was drawn back along the path I had followed, to the points of its intersection with my electronic bane. Hokusai’s warning that night I drank too much— that his prints may trap me—could well be correct. Kit had anticipated my passage a number of times. How could he have?

  Then it struck me. My little book of Hokusai’s prints— a small cloth-bound volume by the Charles E. Turtle Company—had been a present from Kit.

  It is possible that he was expecting me in Japan at about this time, because of Osaka. Once his epigons had spotted me a couple of times, probably in a massive scanning of terminals, could he have correlated my movements with the sequence of the prints in Hokusai’s Views of Ml. Fuji, for which he knew my great fondness, and simply extrapolated and waited? I’ve a strong feeling that the answer is in the affirmative.

  Entering the data-net with Kit was an overwhelming experience. That my consciousness spread and flowed I do not deny. That I was many places simultaneously, that I rode currents I did not at first understand, that knowledge and transcendence and a kind of glory were all about me and within me was also a fact of peculiar perception. The speed with which I was borne seemed instantaneous, and this was a taste of eternity. The access to multitudes of terminals and enormous memory banks seemed a measure of omniscience. The possibility of the manipulation of whatever I would change within this realm and its consequences at that place where I still felt my distant body seemed a version of omnipotence. And the feeling … I tasted the sweetness, Kit with me and within me. It was self surrendered and recovered in a new incarnation, it was freedom from mundane desire, liberation …

  “Stay with me here forever,” Kit seemed to say.

  “No,” I seemed to answer, dreamlike, finding myself changing even further. “I cannot surrender myself so willingly.”

  “Not for this? For unity and the flow of connecting energy?”

  “And this wonderful lack of responsibility?”

  “Responsibility? For what? This is pure existence. There is no past.”

  “Then conscience vanishes.”

  “What do you need it for? There is no future either.”

  “Then all actions lose their meaning.”

  “True. Action is an illusion. Consequence is an illusion.”

  “And paradox triumphs over reason.”

  “There is no paradox. All is reconciled.”

  “Then meaning dies.”

  “Being is the only meaning.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Feel it!”

  “I do. But it is not enough. Send me back before I am changed into something I do not wish to be.”

  “What more could you desire than this?”

  “My imagination will die, also. I can feel it.”

  “And what is imagination?”

  “A thing born of feeling and reason.”

  “Does this not feel right?”

  “Yes, it feels right. But I do not want that feeling unaccompanied. When I touch feeling with reason, I see that it is sometimes but an excuse for failing to close with complexity.”

  “You can deal with any complexity here. Behold the data! Does reason not show you that this condition is far superior to that you knew but moments ago?”

  “Nor can I trust reason unaccompanied. Reason without feeling has led humanity to enact monstrosities. Do not attempt to disassemble my imagination this way.”

  “You retain your reason and your feelings!”

  “But they are coming unplugged—with this storm of bliss, this shower of data. I need them conjoined, else my imagination is lost.”

  “Let it be lost. then. It has served its purpose. Be done with it now. What can you imagine that you do not already have here?”

  “I cannot yet know, and that is its power. If there be a will with a spark of divinity to it. I know it only through my imagination. I can give you anything else but that I will not surrender.**

  “And that is all? A wisp of possibility?”

  “No. But it alone is too much to deny.”

  “And my love for you?”

  “You no longer love in the human wav. Let me go back.”

  “Of course. You will think about it. You will return.”

  “Back! Now!”

  I pushed the helmet from my head and rose quickly. I returned to the bathroom, then to my bed. I slept as if drugged, for a long while.

  Would I have felt differently about possibilities, the future, imagination, had I not been pregnant—a thing I had suspected but not yet mentioned to him. and which he had missed learning with his attention focused upon our argument? I like to think that my answers would have been the same, but I will never know. My condition was confirmed by a local doctor the following day. I made the visit I had been putting off because my life required a certainty of something then—a certainty of anything. The screen in the work area remained blank for three days.

  I read and I meditated. Then of an evening the light came on again:

  ARE YOU READY?

  I activated the keyboard. I typed one word:

  NO.

  I disconnected the induction couch and its helmet then. I unplugged the unit itself, also.

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello…” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked me.

  I screamed and hung up. He had penetrated the phone circuits, appropriated a voice.

  It rang again. I answered again.

  “You will never know rest until you come to me,” he said.

  “I will if you will leave me alone,” I told him.

  “I cannot. You are special to me. I want you with me. I love you.”

  I hung up. It rang again. I tore the phone from the wall.

  I had known that I would have to leave soon. I was overwhelmed and depressed by all the reminders of our life together. I packed quickly and I departed. I took a room at a hotel. As soon as I was settled into it, the telephone rang and it was Kit again. My registration had gone into a computer and …

  I had them disconnect my phone at the switchboard. I put out a Do Not Disturb sign. In the morning I saw a telegram protruding from beneath the door. From Kit. He wanted to talk to me.

  I determined to go far away. To leave the country, to return to the States.

  It was easy for him to follow me. We leave electronic tracks almost everywhere. By cable, satellite, optic fiber he could be wherever he chose. Like an unwanted suitor now he pestered me with calls, interrupted television shows to flash messages upon the screen, broke in on my own calls, to friends, lawyers, realtors, stores. Several times, horribly, he even sent me flowers. My electric bodhisattva, my hound of heaven, would give me no rest. It is a terrible thing to be married to a persistent data-net.

  So I settled in the country. I would have nothing in my home whereby he could reach me. I studied ways of avoiding the system, of slipping past his many senses.

  On those few occasions when I was careless he reached for me again immediately. Only he had learned a new trick, and I became convinced that he had developed it for the purpose of taking me into his world by force. He could build up a charge at a terminal, mold it into something like ball lightning and animallike, and send that shortlived artifact a little distance to do his will. I learned its weakness, though, in a friend’s home when one came for me, shocked me, and attempted to propel me into the vicinity of the terminal, presumably for purposes of translation. I struck at the epigon—as Kit later referred to it in a telegram of explanation and apology—with the nearest object to hand—a lighted table lamp, which entered its field and blew a circuit immediately. The epigon was destroyed, which is how I discovered that a s
light electrical disruption created an instability within the things.

  I stayed in the country and raised my daughter. I read and I practiced my martial arts and I walked in the woods and climbed mountains and sailed and camped: rural occupations all, and very satisfying to me after a life of intrigue, conflict, plot and counterplot, violence, and then that small, temporary island of security with Kit. I was happy with my choice.

  Fuji across the lava beds … Springtime … Now I am returned. This was not my choice.

  17. Mt. Fuji from Lake Suwa

  And so I come to Lake Suwa, Fuji resting small in the evening distance. It is no Kamaguchi of powerful reflections for me. But it is serene, which joins my mood in a kind of peace. I have taken the life of the spring into me now and it has spread through my being. Who would disrupt this world, laying unwanted forms upon it? Seal your lips.

  Was it not in a quiet province where Botchan found his maturity? I’ve a theory concerning books like that one of Natsume Soseki’s. Someone once told me that this is the one book you can be sure that every educated Japanese has read. So I read it. In the States I was told that Huckleberry Finn was the one book you could be sure that every educated Yankee had read. So I read it. In Canada it was Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. In France it was Le Grand Meaulnes. Other countries have their books of this sort. They are all of them pastorals, having in common a closeness to the countryside and the forces of nature in days just before heavy urbanization and mechanization. These things are on the horizon and advancing, but they only serve to add the spice of poignancy to the taste of simpler values. They are youthful books, of national heart and character, and they deal with the passing of innocence. I have given many of them to Kendra.