Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  A wearying, difficult, often-imagined program began. A single man of Earth could eventually have learned much of what was on the largest plates; it began with arithmetic—of course, binary. A dot is a dot; a dot and a space are two dots. Two dots are three dots; their zero was really zero—nothing, a discontinuity in the flowing script. A gracious, subtly-curved eye-shape was the addition-operator; negative numbers were made not of dots but little sun-bursts, and so on. It was only mathematics; the Snowflake plowed deliberately through it all, kid-stuff geometry, the functions of the conic sections. It was not very elegant; the Snowflake felt that elegance had been foregone and crude old concepts resurrected from primitive days. But the Snowflake learned; this is “height” sign, this is “skill” sign, “big,” “bigger than,” “includes,” “logically implies”—and then on to the first reader, the second-largest of the sets of plates. Blue-green, tentacled monsters were the subjects; eating, sleeping, crawling (but say “walking”) were the verbs. Monsters (but say “men”) watch the stars. The great sun rises and warms men. The spermatiferous man impregnates (“loves?”) the ovipositing man—whom you might as well call a woman, for she is. For one hundred and sixty-six days the laid egg is—it certainly seemed to be worshipped. Then the child is born, and the second degree of worship is accorded to it. A small—Something—is assigned to the child, and the child is cleansed with the mouths of its—certainly not “impregnating” here; certainly “loving”—parents. The child eats good food under the guidance of its parents and its Something-again. The child sleeps too heavily and the Something-again wakes its parents who in loving concern do something about it, the Snowflake could not make out what. The child learns to count and to read books like this. The modified-loving Something-again helps. The child walks, the child runs in the sun, the child goes far and fast riding the Something-again, for the Something-again has grown with the child. Then the child is half-grown and the third degree of worship is accorded to it and it begins to master the Twelve Hundred and Eighteen Books of First Importance. When that is done the child is grown and is a child no longer but a man or woman, and its Something-again too is grown. The new-grown man is modified-loving to the full-grows Something-again, for there is a certain danger in Somethings-again, useful in everything though they are. Absent-mindedness in the treatment (“tentaculation”—“handling”) of a full-grown Something-again can be fatal—

  The Snowflake quivered in its nutrient bath when it realized that absent-mindedness had been fatal. The full-grown Pyramids, convenient things to have around, had risen immemorial ages ago and destroyed their masters who had built them, gutted their pleasant planet and turned it into a bleak junkpile, a fit environment for the machines they were.

  15

  As Haendl had grimly foreseen, the human beings in the vast corridor of the machine shop next were deprived of their water. The taps simply stopped running.

  There was panic, as might have been predicted, and then there was the inevitable consequence: migration. Men with flesh on them do not lie down to die; women with babies in them do not despair. If they are ringed by fire they will break through where the flames seem thinnest, but they will break through. With hunger at their heels and nothing worse than hunger ahead, men go anywhere: from the ancestral home in the Indus Valley or the Euphrates or the Congo they eat their way across the old world, then cross a land bridge and eat their way down the new.

  These migrants spread out from the corridor through its two exits; they scouted the red-lit caverns of the binary, twenty, forty miles a day. They found water everywhere, for it is a useful solvent and took part in most of the mechanized planet’s chemical processing. They bashed many a pipe loose from its joints and drank their fill and spread on. Scent guided them one hundred miles before they looked again like sober Citizens, ribs countable and thighs dwindling into stringy shanks; but by then they were in the metabolic-products complex of the binary, a tangle of pipes, pumps and vats many of which held sugars, starches, proteins and fats.

  Epics should be written about Innison and how he scaled the hundred-foot fermentation tank where glucose was going over into alcohol, and how he shattered the glass input main so that food showered down upon the throng below. Nor should be forgotten The Tale of Muhandas Dutta, and How He Blew up the Polyethelene Cooker. The vast thing stood between them and an unmistakable meaty, yeasty odor. They were abounding with energy from the glucose but their bodies knew they were starving for replacement and repair molecules, that they could not live on energy alone. Princeton Wolves studied the stages of the polyethelene tower, a glum stainless-steel citadel from which protruded clear blisters filled with the successive polymers. Down at the bottom, swirling gas only; heat and pressure filled the next higher blister with thin fluid, and the blister above with viscous fluid, and up at the top great paddles churned a waxy paste through the output main to a storage facility or direct to presses and extrusion nozzles which might be half a world away. A planetful of circuitry was always in need of some insulation, somewhere; shorts were spitting blue fire somewhere at any given moment, and machines crawling toward them laden with copper and polyethelene pellets to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. And this source of dressings stood like a bastion between the men and the smell of yeast. There was no way around except through vats of fuming nitric acid, rooms whose air was death.

  Muhandas Dutta consulted with Wolves, warned all the others back around solid walls and onto high ground up ramps, and alone climbed a great, rugged weld that led half-way up the fermentation tank. There was the place where ethanol was drawn off, and there it was tasted by instruments whose wires led some here to a Component. The end of the wires that mattered to Dutta went through a packing gland into the output main. The gland was strong, but it was not homogeneous with the rest of the tank and pipe. There were places where the gland and the pipe met, and there Dutta inserted his milling-machine sliver and pried. With one arm and both legs he clung to the meter-thick pipe; with the other he pried for an hour, two hours, three hours. When scouts came wandering from around the thick walls where he had sent them he screamed down at them to go back; it was giving way. So the scouts returned to the people, and the people waited, hungry and thirsty, smashing water pipes for their drink, getting out of the way of slow-moving pipe-repair machines when they came, and smashing the pipes again when they were gone.

  In the fourth hour of Dutta’s ordeal the packing gland started to sweat ethanol drops at its edges. In the fifth hour came a dribbling stream whose fumes made him cling dizzily, and in the sixth the gland blasted out like a bullet and blew Muhandas Dutta with it, destroying him like a mutineer blown from the muzzle of a gun.

  The ethanol roared down in a glassy column to the floor, and sped downgrade to the polyethelene cooker’s cherry-red base. The ethanol boomed into blue flame on contact, and the cherry-red of the cooker went into orange-red and then orange. The explosion ripped it an instant later, puffing out all flame with a gigantic breath. Distracted repair machines sprinkled the hot rubble and pawed at riven plates. When their fire-control fluid stopped sizzling on the tangled wreckage the human beings came out and climbed it, threading around fantastic spires and hummocks of poly-chrome plastic extruded before its time and untimely chilled; from the top of the heap they could see the promised land: flat culture tanks of yeast indefatigably working away under arc lights, manufacturing proteins, handy, versatile long-chain molecules, and nutritious, too.

  For the time being, their food problem was solved. To solve it they had done the binary planet a century’s-worth of damage in a matter of hours; they were being excellent mice.

  Through the Snowflake quivered the realization that this was a problem beyond intellect: what ought one to think of entities-that-were-machines instead of entities-that-were-living? Logic alone could make no distinction. On a gross level there was oh, what difference between a lever and a poet! But logic did not stop with levers and poets. Logic went on to consider the difference between
a self-programming computer and the microscopically-revealed network of electro-chemical feedback processes that could grossly be called “a poet,” and found the difference smaller. And logic could not be stopped from going on to machines unbuilt, the most complex machine imaginable, capable of choice, self-reproducing, versatile with limbs and transducers, and comparing it with a description unwritten, the most exhaustive description of “a poet” that could be produced, bearing in mind that there was really nothing in him but input, switching and output. On the nameplate of a machine and on the brow of a poet might be inscribed with equal justice Ex Nihil Nihil Fit; you get nothing from nothing. You get bombarded by the environment with sense-impressions and something happens, machine or man. You input a pound of force on the long end of a three-to-one lever; it outputs three pounds (over a shorter distance). You input travel books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge; he outputs Xanadu. So simple!

  So wrong. The Snowflake fluttered in its tank knowing it was wrong, but not why or how. It decided (a rare decision) to dissociate into its eight personalities for a time.

  It was harder than ever before for Glenn Tropile. It wrenched him and gave him the curious illusion that he had gone blind—even though his own two eyes could see the murk of the nutrient fluid, his own deformed toenail, the tangle of wires and the switches in his pink, wrinkled hands. Have to adjust the salt content of the nutrient, he thought. There whipped through his mind frighteningly the ion-exchange equations that explained the wrinkling—a hang-over of the endlessly analytical life within the Snowflake.

  Django Tembo of course spoke first. “Children,” he said, “the last of my hesitation is gone. I have no more compassion for these invaders, the Pyramids; they were bad servants and rebels. This can never be tolerated. It must be war to the death.” For the Snowflake had considered a modus vivendi with the Pyramids as perhaps the most economical solution of the problem.

  There was a soundless murmur of agreement.

  “What place this?” Willy asked, and began to cry.

  “Hush, Willy,” Mercedes van Dellen soothed him. “It’s all right. We’re your friends.” Willy put his thumb in his mouth, not letting go of his switch, and was at peace. Warm here. Good here.

  It was, surprisingly, Kim Seong who spoke up next: “We should have a little talk with the fellow under the North Pole, the green boy with all the arms. He’s older than any of us.”

  “He’s dead!” Tropile said, astonished.

  “Must be nice to be so cocksure,” she said dryly. “I, of course, wouldn’t know, not being a man. All I know is that it’s smart to be ready for any dirty little trick that can be sprung on you.”

  Alla Narova said: “I think they’re sorry they killed all their people. I think they’re trying to revive that one; that’s what all the puttering is about. I think they want to tell it they’re sorry.”

  “No, no!” cried Corso Navarone. “You are too forgiving in your womanly heart. They are fiends; they are tormenting it. Death to the monsters, I say, and I shall say it forever!” If he could have folded his arms he would have, but the wire-trailing switches got in the way.

  Spyros Gulbenkian said: “Let us consider the whole situation, my friends. We should hit them high and hit them low. Our hitting low proceeds successfully; our good people from Earth have provided the repair-machines with tasks of an order of magnitude beyond their programming or mechanical capacities. Soon several score of the women will come to term. The second generation, my dear friends! Let them only grow to sexual maturity in thirteen or fourteen clock-years and this planet is doomed! But I am overdramatic. The earth-people will multiply, I should say, and the pyramids and their machinery will fail to cope with them. Time is on our side—what a luxury for an old man to say that! Misunderstood, un-understood, they will proliferate through the planet in their innocent way. They will drain sedimentation pans to establish new yeast beds unmindful that sediment-laden coke pellets will produce quite inferior steel with which the Pyramids will order devices to be manufactured. They will notice that a chamber is quite livable as to temperature and humidity except that chlorine gas is blown through it. In their innocence they will jam the fan which drives the chlorine, not knowing or caring that this lack of chlorine will end for a time the production on this planet of polychloroprene without which oil-resistant gaskets cannot be manufactured. The weak flesh! The weak flesh, driven by hunger and progeny! What wreckage the weak flesh will do to iron-bound machines!”

  “I won’t wait a century,” Tropile snarled.

  “For what?” asked Gulbenkian, blandly.

  “For—for—” He did not know. He said almost as a question: “To be human again. Walk the Earth...my God, what are we doing?”

  Willy began to cry with fright. Mercedes van Dellen soothed him.

  “What are we doing?” Tropile asked again, trying to be calm. “We’ve ripped our friends out of the Earth and turned them loose to be vermin for our convenience. We weren’t a god; we were a devil!”

  Like the flip of a kaleidoscope events had suddenly changed while he watched them. The steady certainty of the Snowflake which knew nothing except tasks and their economical fulfillment had become the inhuman fixity of a machine.

  “We were a machine!” he cried. “We were as much a machine as the Pyramids. There was no soul in us, no pity.”

  “Yes,” said Alla Narova, suddenly awed. “How could we have done it? Django Tembo, how could you have let us?”

  The dung-bearer had the soul of a king—but an African king. Deeply troubled, he told them: “Look into my heart and you will see why I do not understand your objections.”

  They looked and saw. He had been fundamentally baffled by “not a god but a devil.” To him it had sounded like the crudest, most naked illogic. Devil and god were the same to his people after millennia in fatless, acid-soiled Africa. Men do not eat other men calmly except in Africa. Siberian shamans used to tear madly at the flesh of those who watched them dance, but every unspeakable mouthful later was vomited up so that the lawbreaking did not bring ruin on the tribe. Polynesians and Melanesians dined on long pig to dare fate and trembled when they did it. Only in starved Africa was a man the same as meat, no more and no less. So it was that when Tropile spoke, Django Tembo heard him say: “We weren’t a devil-god; we were a devil-god.” He could not understand that as a value-judgment; nobody could.

  Gulbenkian chuckled at the impasse.

  Django Tembo said, puzzled and simple: “Strength is better than weakness, friends. Together we are strong. What more is there to say? Who can guide every step so that no ant is ever crushed by him?”

  “You’ll never get me back in there,” said Tropile.

  “Or me,” said Alla Narova.

  “You cannot do this!” Corso Navarone cried. “Alla Narova whom I love, Glen Tropile, my trusted companion, deserters? Never!”

  “I think the same,” said Spyros Gulbenkian with interest. “I mean really think, with the brain and not with the gonads—no offense, Corso. Exactly how are you going to desert? I think we can, so to speak, pull you under if we wish.”

  “Try it!” Tropile snarled.

  “Try it!” Alla Narova echoed.

  “If it weren’t for Willy,” Mercedes van Dellen said apologetically. “He’d be lost without us—” Kim Seong said delightedly: “I’ll just watch. I love a good fight between a pair of fools. It breaks things up.”

  Tropile and Alla Narova felt the attack begin from Django Tembo; it came in the form of false memories insinuating themselves into their minds. Glaring deserts of rock and sand that merged into snowy steppes, the death of the last elephant, on Earth, Tembo’s totem, in the streets of Durban, the aged ivory-laden beast crashing to its arthritic knees and toppling on its side, grunting...Princeton and Gala dimmed in Tropile’s mind, Nice, and the old blind man in Alla Narova’s. The fierce, confused, inflated thoughts of Corso Navarone exhorted them to be brave, strong, united, gallant, dignified like him. Spyros Gulbenkian, ne
ver one to lead a cavalry charge, spattered them with this day in Paris six sun-cycles ago when he won the toll-gate franchise on the Ninth Bridge, the foundation of his fortune; that night in Frankfurt’s House of Regulations when he blew the wall and permitted his chief bookkeeper to escape—the charge was Wolf, of course; an afternoon between the paws of the Great Sphinx when he and a trader named Shalom bartered African grain for French sugarbeet. Mercedes van Dellen: Poor Willy. He doesn’t really understand but he feels better when we’re all together. He forgets that he doesn’t understand. Maybe he’s improving. Don’t you think so? Maybe the next time we come out he’ll be a little clearer. Wouldn’t that be good? Glen and Alla, won’t you let go for poor Willy?

  And Alla Narova broke the flashing exchange with an angry sob. “Willy’s upset!” she cried. “He won’t answer me.”

  With an effort, Tropile expelled the false memories and the pseudo-voices. “Stop a minute, everybody!” he shouted. “If you’re so worried about what Willy wants, let’s give him a chance to speak for himself.”

  The Snowflake—seven-eighths of it—fell silent. It was the turn of the remaining one-eighth to speak.

  It didn’t do so, however. Uncertainly, Alla Narova quavered, “Willy?”

  No answer.

  “He feels funny,” said Spyros Gulbenkian.

  Then everybody knew that Willy felt funny, because the motionless body jerked into violent motion. “What’s he doing?” Tropile cried. “Willy! Cut it out! The way you’re wriggling around you could hurt something!”