No Direction Home

by Norman Spinrad

  The first thing I remembered was Loy. Loy! Where was she? What were they doing to her? Loy! Loy!

  “Loy! Loy! Loy!” I found myself screaming.

  I felt a pressure in my mind, a presence, cold and clammy, without passion, without malice, without emotion, without mercy. A pressure that was a questioning, a search, a leaching. I began to remember more…

  Fifth planet of a yellow sun. A fair green world, not like the others Loy and I had found. Loy… my love, my woman, my wife. A honeymoon world, a world fit for colonization, hence a world where, by the terms of the contract, we could spend the remaining six months of our Honeymoon Year enjoying the green grass and the blue sky and the fresh clean air. No more weeks in space in the cramped two-place Scout, no more methane worlds, chlorine worlds, jungle worlds, desert worlds.

  The Honeymoon World, the Jackpot World, the Bonus World…

  Death World.

  “Loy! Loy! Loy!”

  The circle of gray, quivering brains seemed to pulse faster, as if with some not-quite-familiar strain, and I felt the pressure in my mind change, reach for language concepts in my brain, pick, choose, and form words.

  The woman is elsewhere, the words that were and were not of my mind told me. Elsewhere.

  The fog began to evaporate from my memory…

  We had surveyed the planet from orbit, and, finding it fair and habitable, we had landed the Scout in a lush green meadow close by wooded hills.

  Loy smiled at me as we stepped out of the airlock and inhaled the fragrant, heady odors of growing things.

  “There!” she said, putting her arm around my waist. “Now, aren’t you glad we decided to take a Honeymoon Contract?”

  “We were so right,” I said with a little laugh. It had been her idea in the first place, and she had talked me into it. My attitude had been that the government was not about to give anyone something for nothing. A Honeymoon Contract sounded like the best of all possible deals: the government provided any couple who could pass the minimal physical and psychological tests with a two-place Scout to roam the stars for a year together. In return, all we had to do was prepare a brief survey of each planet we found. I! we were lucky enough to find one suitable for colonization, we could spend the rest of our year on it, and collect a bonus that would set us up for life when we returned to Earth.

  Of course, the government did not do this out of sentiment. The human race needed room to expand, and that meant new planets. Perhaps one out of fifty solar systems had a habitable planet. Therefore, the economical way to go about finding them was to send out plenty of cheap two-place Scouts. Under ordinary conditions, two people simply could not stay sane cooped up alone for a year it in the vastness of interstellar space. But a man and a woman…

  Necessity had made a hard governmental policy out of an ancient romantic notion: the stars were for lovers.

  Loy did not quite see it that way. To her, all creation was something designed for our particular pleasure and enjoyment, and so it was the most natural thing in her world for the government to be so thoughtful as to provide us with a free honeymoon. The succession of chlorine worlds, dead rocks, and gas giants we had discovered in the first six months of our Honeymoon Year had somehow left this attitude largely untouched—after all, we had each other.

  The most beautiful thing about Loy was that she could make me see things her way.

  So we were like two children together on a summer Sunday in the park. It was that kind of world, a world of low, broad-bladed grass, brilliantly feathered birds, high blue sky, small six-legged rodents, berry bushes, fruit trees… A happy, innocent Honeymoon World.

  You can see how happy and wrapped up in each other we had become. No world is a park or a garden. The absence of a full spectrum of predators usually means something, and usually something sentient, has wiped out the competition—so they told us in our briefings.

  Finally, after days of… well, I don’t know what else to call it but romping in the meadow, we decided to do a little real exploring in the nearby woods.

  Loy was all for traveling as lightly as possible, taking only a sleeping bag and some concentrates to supplement the local fruits and berries, which had proved edible and rather tasty. We had the closest thing to an argument we ever had when I insisted on taking energy rifles along.

  “It’s just not right, Bill,” she said, pouting and canting her blonde head to one side at an engaging angle. “This planet has been so nice to us. It trusts us, and it’s only right that we trust it. Carrying those ugly guns… it just isn’t right, it’s being, well, you know, nasty.”

  I tried to win the argument with a kiss, but she turned sulkily away. “Look, honey,” I said, “we don’t know what’s in those woods. There may be things there that are much nastier than us. An energy rifle can stop an elephant in its tracks, and when it gets dark and scary and gloomy at night in those woods, with strange night noises and things scuffling around in the dark, you’ll be glad I insisted on bringing the rifles, even if we never have to use them.”

  “But, Bill—”

  “Look at it this way. If we don’t have the guns, we’ll have to be suspicious and cautious every time we hear a strange sound—we won’t be able to trust anything. But if we do have the guns, we won’t have to be leary at all, because an energy rifle can stop anything.”

  “Ooooh, masculine logic!” she sighed, but there was a giggle behind it, and I gave her a hug, and we took the rifles.

  The woods were dense and dark, with gnarled, thick-trunked trees and tightly interlaced networks of leafy branches. But the undergrowth was very light, there seemed to be no dangerous animals, and we made good time. By nightfall, we had reached the base of the low, rolling hills, Loy cooked a meal of concentrates, topped off with local fruits and berries. We crawled into the sleeping bag early, and after several hours of enjoying the cool woods and the night sounds and each other, we drifted off into sleep.

  At some indeterminable time during the night, half in dream, half awake, I felt an odd pressure in my mind. The feeling was strange, but not really menacing. It was an awareness of an interest not my own, a cold, emotionless questing for knowledge rifling through my mind as if it were some encyclopedia. A questing, a questioning, a knowledge-vacuum, with no form, no flavor, no personality behind it…

  I lay there motionless, my eyes closed, in that gray borderland between sleep and wakefulness, wondering whether or not I was dreaming and not really caring.

  Suddenly, Loy screamed beside me, and I was instantly wide awake, eyes open, and I saw them.

  Encircling our sleeping bag were ten monstrosities, about the size of very large dogs—bodies like great slimy slugs, supporting what appeared to be naked living brains, brains ten times the size of a human brain, wet and pulsating. The things had no arms, no legs, no tentacles, just ghastly brains on slimy slug-bodies.

  Loy was clinging to me, shaking and sobbing. I reached instinctively for the energy rifle close by the sleeping bag. Something froze my arm, then the rest of me. I was paralyzed, and now I was aware, dreadfully aware, of the alien presence in my mind.

  I felt it grope in my mind for words, memories of concepts, pick, choose, and form words in my mind.

  Who? From where? What?

  Dazed, numb, only partially in control of the inner workings of my own mind, I found myself forming mental answers to the mental questions.

  We’re humans, from Earth, another world circling another star.

  Other intelligences, the presence thought into my mind. Other races. Most interesting. Possibilities of accumulating much new data. Knowledge expansion. Good.

  There was no emotion behind any of it, unless you want to consider an almost obscene lust for knowledge, data, an emotion. A million angry questions tried to form themselves in my mind, but I felt the mental presence bat them away with casual indifference.

  Different, the presence said, growing ever more facile with the borrowed words. You and the other are different from each
other. Your physical structures are not contributing to the same mental structure. Do separate races share your planet?

  I was in no mood to answer inane questions. Loy had gone quiet in my arms, paralyzed as I was, but I knew that she was still terrified, and I had to act, if only mentally, to remove that which was causing her fear. But my mind was not my own. I felt my total mental resources struggling to answer the alien’s questions, my entire stock of memories and mental capacities rising to do its bidding, to fill the yawning knowledge-vacuum.

  I watched, almost as an outside observer, as my mind marshalled itself and answered. I found myself explaining things I had never even stopped to consider: what it was to be a human being, the difference between men and women, how Earth was inhabited by billions of separate organic systems called human beings, whose mental structures, minds, were distinct and separate from each other, billions of unique and separate mental universes arising from an equal number of physical organisms.

  I felt the presence in my mind boggle, almost stagger, unwilling to believe yet unable to disbelieve. In that moment of confusion I felt the thing’s control over my mind waver for an instant, and I used that moment to shape my own confusion into a demand, a question: Who, what, are you? Then I tried to reach for the energy rifle again, and I felt the presence resume its iron control of my mind.

  There seemed to be a hesitation in the thing, and I hen a sense of somewhat reluctant decision. I felt words forming themselves in my mind:

  There is a possibility that knowledge on your part may facilitate the accumulation of data. I… am. I do not think of my mental structure as “I.” The presence detected by your mental structure is that of the mental structure of this planet. This planet bears many species of organisms. The organisms you now see are one such species. They are so specialized that their separate physical structures give rise to one unified mental structure, that is, to what you think of as “me.” These organisms have no other function but the erection of this mental structure. The mental structure thus erected, may control the physical structures of all other organisms, including your own. I am the mental structure of this planet, the sentient being, the intelligent race. According to all previously accumulated data, I had hypothesized that I was the only such mental structure that existed, the only center of awareness in the universe. Now data is made available to the effect that at least one planet exists where billions of organisms give rise to billions of separate mental structures, so that in effect your planet has several billion intelligent races. This promises a vast new area of knowledge, and much data that may now be accumulated.

  It was my turn to boggle, to be unwilling to believe yet unable, by the very nature of the contact, to disbelieve. An intelligent race, thousands, perhaps millions of individual organisms giving rise to but one mind! A mind alone, without companionship, without love or hate or jealousy… Without, I suddenly realized, the concept of death. Emotions, hopes, fear—which in the last analysis is always the fear of individual death—how could a mind alone know any of these? What could motivate such a mind, impel it to action?

  Suddenly, I felt myself virtually unable to think. The alien mind was dampening my thoughts with an almost irresistible power. It seemed to exult, to rejoice, to loll in a kind of obscene anticipation that was almost sensual in its intensity.

  Such knowledge! Such a rich store of new data! Such a wealth of new possibilities to explore, experiments to perform!

  And I realized that there was only one thing which could occupy such a mind: the quest for knowledge itself, but a quest for knowledge that was not abstract, not cold and intellectual, but raised to the level of a basic emotion, the basic emotion, a drive virtually sexual in its power and intensity.

  I felt Loy tense against me. I felt her fear and I shared it. There was no point of empathy with such a mind. This was an entity asocial, hence amoral, to its very core. And we were totally in its power.

  “Let us go,” I said wordlessly to the world-mind. “Let us go and we’ll tell you all you want to know. When we get back to Earth, we’ll send back scientists, men who specialize in knowledge. You can learn more from them than you ever can from us.”

  Yes, that will be good. Later. After all possible data has been accumulated from yon. There is much to be learned, very much. It will take a long tune to exhaust the possibilities. Especially concerning the peculiar states of mental structure you call emotions. And most particularly the emotion you call love. It seems to be the most powerful and the most important. But this other phenomenon, the one you call death… That will require much, much experimentation.

  And I remembered, now I remembered it all. How the alien mind had seized control of our bodies, how we had been trotted against our wills unerringly through the night to the system of caves in the hills, surrounded by the brain-slugs… How Loy had been separated from me, once we were within the caves… How I had been lying on the cave floor for some unknown length of time, somehow needing neither food nor water, feeling neither hunger nor thirst, totally controlled by the world-mind…

  I remembered the probing, the endless rifling of my mind for things of significance and things trivial until everything I had ever known, every memory I had ever had, things I had thought I had forgotten, things ! never knew I knew, had been sucked from me and greedily devoured by the knowledge-crazed mind.

  And then it had begun in earnest, the experiments, the endless, horrible experiments. Pain, hunger, ecstasy, fear, lust, the whole spectrum of emotions and drives—the thing made me experience them over and over again, while it hovered in my mind, observing, clucking to itself, recording, evaluating, savoring.

  I remember asking again and again what was happening to Loy, and finally, when the world-mind was good and ready, it let me know. Loy was conveyed into the chamber by a bevy of the brain-slugs, her body thin and drawn and not her own. I was forced to watch, immobilized, while the same things that had been done to me were done to her.

  I watched the pain and the fear and the lust play over her features, and all the while I could feel the presence in my mind watching my reactions, accumulating the knowledge of how a man feels when he is watching his bride being tortured.

  Then the process was reversed and Loy was forced to watch while the world-mind did things to me.

  Finally, the thing was satisfied. Most interesting, the words in my mind said. Although your two mental structures are separate entities, there seems to be some interaction between them. If one of you undergoes unpleasant stimuli, both of you seem to react. It is as if your mental structures were partially connected. This seems to be at least the major part of the phenomenon you call love. Most interesting. Love would seem to be one of the two strongest aberrations called emotions to which your mental structures are prone. One may consider it one pole of your emotional spectrum. The other pole seems to be a fear of this phenomenon you call death. That will have to be investigated most thoroughly.

  And Loy had been led out, and I died for the first time.

  Now I truly remembered everything. This was not the first time I had died and been reborn! How many times had I died? I had no way of knowing. Each time, it had been truly death, death without memory of the earlier deaths. Each time had somehow been the one and only time, all-obliterating death itself, and—

  Very good, the presence in my mind said. You have died one hundred and seventy-three times. Much data has been gathered, much has been understood. This death is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, the permanent destruction of your mental structure. You now understand death totally. You know in detail just what it is to die. There is nothing that you can experience as being more unpleasant. Most interesting. The same reaction was observed in all of the woman’s deaths as well.

  “You filthy—”

  It cut me off impatiently, the brain-things pulsing and squirming in the pale blue light. It was necessary that she undergo the same experiences, both as a control and as a condition of the final experiment.
<
br />   “Final experiment?”

  Yes. All possible data has been accumulated, except for one final and most interesting experiment. It has been established that one pole of your emotional spectrum is love. The other is the fear of death. It but remains to determine which is stronger. At the conclusion of this experiment, one of you will be permitted to return to your own planet.

  “One of us?”

  Of necessity, the presence said. The purpose of this final experiment is to determine which is the stronger stimulus: love or death. You will both undergo the experience of death one final time. This time you will be permitted to retain the memories of all your previous deaths as you die. But this time you will really die. You will not awaken from this death. Each of you will have only one way of saving yourself: you must sacrifice the other. You have only to declare in your mind that you wish the other to die in your place and it shall be done. Then you will be allowed to return to your planet. It should be a most informative experiment.

  And once again, I felt the blackness closing in, numbness overwhelming my extremities, my body sloughing away from me. I felt myself sinking slowly but inexorably into the black, black pool of nothingness…

  But this time the terror was even greater, for now I remembered this happening before, again and again and again. As each tiny fraction of my being, of all in the universe that was me, was chipped away, I was anticipating it, knowing how it would be, fearing it an instant before it came, out of my deep, deep knowledge of exactly what it was to really die. And I knew that Loy was feeling it too.

  I felt my consciousness collapsing in upon itself, contracting, fading away to a point, and every moment I was anticipating the next, dying a thousand deaths in one…

  Inward, ever inward, the screaming animal thing that was me contracted, faded, beating hopelessly against that final, infinitely anticipated oblivion. And Loy was dying too…

  I was reduced to a point of consciousness, a thing in itself, by itself. A tiring ever fading, ever shrinking, and all around was the night, the all-consuming, endless night. The end of me-ness, of hope and fear and pain and love. Of all I ever was, ever would be…