Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

  Then he contracted the muscles in his thighs and closed the circuits.

  Instantly, the metal of the machine began to flow. He felt himself sinking into the north flank of the computer. His fingers penetrated the metal as easily as if it had been modeling clay. He began to get proprioceptive feedback from muscle activity…he could feel the whorls on his fingertips as sucking whirlpools, dark swirling waters that drew his blood and bones through the flesh and out into the machine, spinning the essence of his physical being away from its skin container…his chest began to harden, to vibrate with sound like a thunder sheet of aluminum…the soles of his feet melted and his arches flattened and his lower legs oozed into puddles of mercury…he sank into the machine, was enclosed, its arms around him, welcoming him…

  The Dust blew in hurricane clouds through his body and puffed out through the great smooth apertures in his head and back and buttocks. The Dust mingled with lubricant and it was altered, even as he was altered.

  He perceived with purest immediacy the sense of his positioning of arms and legs and ferrite cores and LSI circuits and bowels and conductors and limbs and body and plates and fissures and counterweights and glands and wiring in the immediate environment that he was the machine had begun to be him.

  Then the auditory and visual feedback began, delayed responses, an instant later than they should have been. He spoke: Oh, good and it repeated from another mouth a moment later, ood. Echolalia.

  He felt his penis engorging with blood and felt the density of light increasing in the capillaries as the plethysmograph measured his arousal in a new language the machine he was the machine interpreted…the density of light decreased…increased…decreased…increased…

  He spiraled upward into the machine—Lissajous pattern oscilloscope sine and cosine waves from the x and y axes actually came together, pulsated in three dimensions and he teased himself the machine he the man with vernier knob stimulation—it came out green and the machine trembled, began to secrete testosterone, estrogen, progresterone…

  She, the machine, he, the machine, she, the man, he, the machine…the man, he becoming she becoming machine…

  His heart was pudding.

  The Lissajous pulsations became hallucinations in the sex organs of the computer…galvanic skin response on the galvanometer…aching in his spine…

  Sinking slowly into a sea of oil. Great skyscraper bulk of metalflesh slowly warmly moistly sinking into a sea of blue-black oil. Pumping. Pumping. Wet closing over his head, running in waves over his naked body. Invisible mat of hair covering every plate and surface, a fine golden down, soaking up oil, engorging, coming to climax.

  Her breasts were warm, the rivets sensitive to each feather caress of electric stim. Her vagina filled with soft, melting things that went up and up and roughened the oil-slick inner surfaces, sliding to touch and knead the vulva. So good. Ood.

  His memory, he could see everything in his memory, stored in the banks, every moment of his life from the first dripping emergence from the vats, the running, the extruding, the rolling, the flattening, the cutting, the shaping, the forming, the welding. Every moment of his life: the instant he was first engaged, the circuits closing, the surge of power, the first inputs, the primary runs, every boring clearing procedure, every exercise, every erroneous output.

  His mother, his father, great cats and the wet scent of their breath, like coolant on overheated coils, the soft taste of Joice in his mouth, her body moving beneath him, sinking into her, tiniest folding of her labia around his penis, the rising to orgasm, the overloading, the heat, the peace of darkness.

  Then he altered his stroke and felt the change to precognitive anticipatory feedback, telling himself how it would feel, fulfilling his own prophecies, the smell of flesh on metal, metal on flesh, the colors of whirling information, increments of semen and fused capacitors.

  He was the teleport, additional human faculties, soft sponge pineal gland, polluted adrenaline, strange eyes, this was the best for me the very best I’ve ever hungry metal lover. They began to converge…everything began to converge. He, the machine called Neil Leipzig, was the x axis; he, the machine called love-partner, was the y axis; they began to converge; identical sine waves, out of phase.

  His pattern was a growing. The machine’s was a throbbing. He passed the machine at a higher level every pulse. The machine grew frantic and drank more power. He tried to catch up, chasing the nymphomaniacal peaks as the machine beckoned him, teased him, taunted him, drew him on, then flashed away. He extended on metal limbs, the machine’s soft flesh grew sunburned and dark and leather tough.

  Then he peaked out, it, she, peaked out, unable to draw more power from her source. They exchanged modes, as the point of destructive interference denied quantum mechanics and was reached: a millisecond of total sound and utter silence. Orgasm: metal became flesh, human became machine.

  The interference pattern was a grating whine that became more and more pure as they came into phase. The machine, in its human throat, began to vibrate in sympathy. She, who had been Neil Leipzig at the start, captured the exponential pattern that had been his, the machine, captured it as it fell away.

  They circled, and the image on the Lissajous screen became a circle as she captured the machine and held her in phase again. Prolate and oblate: two dimensional images slowing, softening, dimming, the message of release and surcease .986, 1.0014, .9999986, 1.00000000014…

  The first thing he heard was the sound of the two cheetahs attacking something, agony and fury. The first thing he saw was the dying point of green light on the oscilloscope screen. The first thing he felt was the rough metal of his chest against the sweat-soaked north flank of his love-partner.

  He was dry. As though he had given the machine a transfusion, as if it had sucked all the juices from him. He understood why Joice and all the others, as free as they had been, had been unable to arouse him in times past, how the first Mekcoucher with its promises of this, had led him further and further into the inevitability of what he had just experienced.

  Now, for the first time in his life, he knew what passion could lead through, what it led to inexorably. And he knew he could never go back. He would stay here, in this terrible place, with these others who shared his lover, and this was all he wanted.

  He fell away from the machine and lay on the rock floor of the cavern. His breath had to be drawn in stages. His head reeled. His hand lay on his metal chest.

  He wanted to sleep, but the sounds of conflict were louder now, insistent, crowding through the pain and satiation his body felt at one and the same time. He rolled over on his stomach, his chest clanking against the rock floor. It was the best for you, too, he thought. The best you ever had, love-partner. You will never forget me. If I die today, you’ll remember always, in every last memory cell.

  At the base of the nearest ledge, the Catman’s cheetahs were struggling with one of the love-partner’s people. He was down and they were savaging him, but clearly trying to avoid killing him. The thief had seen the technique before. It was called putting, as in stay put. The rest of the colony had no part in the melee, and were, in fact, watching with some pleasure—if pleasure could be discerned on faces that were partially metal masks.

  A tall, limping, old woman with copper legs came across from the crowd. She hobbled to Neil as the Catman commanded, “Heel!” and the cheetahs left their chewed and semi-conscious prey. The Catman joined the copper-legged old woman.

  The falcon looked sleepy. It was an illusion.

  “Will you can stay be here with love-partner?” the old woman said. There was a tone of pleading in her voice. “Tewsday,” she said, indicating the pile of worked-over flesh and metal the cheetahs had put, “he was for crazy of you with the love-partner. But I’m the saying one for your give machine love never before that fire hot. If you’ll be stay this place us can make you what my is being, first lover.”

  The Catman moved a step closer. “Neil!”

  There was
raw horror on his face. He had seen his son’s body vanish into the machine, had seen the machine turn soft and swallow the thief, had seen the machine sweat and go mad with lust, had seen his son emerge with his parts altered. Neil Leipzig looked at his father, and at the old woman. “I’ll stay. Now go and take Tewsday for repair.”

  The old woman hobbled away, and the crowd went back into their rock-wall dwellings. Neil Leipzig stood facing the Catman.

  “You can’t. My God, Neil, look at you, and this is only the first time. That thing eats what it loves. Do you want to end up like—”

  He waved a hand at the retreating mob of half-humans.

  “This is where I belong. I haven’t belonged up there for a long time.”

  “Neil, please, I’ll do anything you want; resign my commission, we can go away to another city…”

  “Dad,” he said, “I have always loved you. More than I’ve ever been able to tell you. I always wanted you to fight back. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  “You don’t understand your mother. She’s had bad times, too.”

  “It’s all in aid of nothing. Look at you. You haven’t got a dream left in the world. We’re killing you a little at a time. It’s time I stopped contributing to it and did something final.”

  “But not this, not down here, son…”

  But the thief was gone. The air twittered with bright scintillas of fading light.

  The first jump brought him back to the world imbedded in the earth a quarter of a mile beneath the arroyo. Had he made such a teleportational error earlier, he would have died. But mating with the machine had altered him. The love-partner had never known a teleport, and in the exchange of modes he had been made less than machine but more than mortal. He expanded his personal space and vanished again. The second jump took him to the surface, and he winked in, out in an instant—seen by no living thing, for even the guards were dead, having been pounded by Mr. Robert Mossman.

  The night welcomed him, accepted his mote-outlined shadow, and took no further notice as he vanished again, reappeared, vanished, and in seconds materialized in his mother’s bedroom high in London.

  He leaned over and grasped her by the wrist, and wrenched her from the doze cocoon where she lay, supple and naked, the powder-white marks of the plasticwork making longitudinal lines on her breasts that glowed faintly in the night light. Her eyes snapped open as he dragged her free.

  “Come along, Mom. We have to go now.”

  Then, clutching her naked body to his naked body, he vanished.

  Before merging with the machine, he could not have carried someone with him. But everything was changed now. Vastly changed.

  The Catman was high on the ledge leading to the elevator when the thief reappeared with his mother. The cheetahs padded alongside and the falcon was on the wing. The climb was a difficult one for a man that age, even with unnumbered rejuvenations. The Catman was too far away to do anything to stop him.

  “Neil!”

  “You’re free, Dad. You’re free now. Don’t waste it!”

  The Catman was frozen for only a moment. And in that moment Neil Leipzig carried the semiconscious body of his mother to the love-partner. The Catman screamed, a high and desolate scream because he knew what was happening. He began running down the ledge, screaming to his falcon to intercept, screaming to his cheetahs to get there before him, screaming because he could never make it in time.

  The thief plugged himself in, his mother pressed flat between his naked metalflesh body and the fleshmetal north flank of his love-partner.

  He flexed his thigh muscles, closed the contacts…

  …and offered himself and the suddenly howling woman as the ultimate troilism.

  The machine flowed, the oscilloscope formed a design no living creature had ever seen in more than three dimensions, and then, in an instant, it was over. The machine absorbed what it could not refuse, and there was only the single point of green light on the screen, and endless silence once more beneath the earth.

  The Catman reached the machine, saw the beads of sweat mixed with blood that dotted the north flank, and heard fading moans of brutality that repeated soundlessly.

  The Catman sits alone in a room, remembering.

  The child never knew. It was not the mother. The mother always loved, but had no way of showing it. The father had never loved, and had every way of reinforcing it, day after day.

  The Catman sits and mourns. Not for the child, gone and without sorrow. For the woman.

  For the bond of circumstances that held them together through days and nights of a special kind of love forged in a cauldron of hate.

  He will never forgive the child for having destroyed that love out of hate.

  He will sit alone now. He has nothing left to live for. He hopes the child burns in a terrible Hell, even as he burns in his own. And after a while, there is always the conversing waterfall.

  Los Angeles, California; Hanover, New Hampshire; New York City; Gull Lake, Hickory Corners, Michigan/1972

  11.

  Hindsight: 480 Seconds

  Haddon Brooks, a poet, stood in the last city of the Earth, waiting for the word impact to come from space. He was being recorded. What he saw, how he felt, all the sounds and smells and smallest touches of the death of his world went up and out to the ships as they began the final journey to new homes somewhere in the stars. His vital signs were being monitored, thalamic taps carried his thoughts and transmitted all the colors of what lay around him, to be stored in memory cassettes aboard the ships. Someone to report the death of the Earth had been the short of it, and from that call for a volunteer he had been winowed from the ten thousand applicants.

  Ten thousand masochists, voyeurs, harbingers of destruction, possessors of the death-wish, psychotics, chill analytical thinkers, fanatics, true believers and those who thought they were cameras. From ten thousand he had been chosen, because he was a poet and on this occasion perhaps only the eyes of a certain dreamer could be depended upon to relay the event with enough magic for the generations of children who would be born in space or on distant worlds circling unknown suns. He had volunteered not because he was a man bereft of sense or survivors, but because he was a man with too much to live for. He had a wife whom he loved, he had children who adored him, he had peace and genius and was content with his gifts. Such a man could feel the anguish of losing the racial home. So he had volunteered, knowing he was correct for the task, and they had chosen him from the ten thousand because it was clear that he could sum up final moments with order and beauty.

  The city was still alive. It had been kept so for him. All the others had been melted down for their fissionable materials. The cities had become the great Orion ships, three million tons each, shaped like the Great Pyramid of Giza, with slightly conical pusher-plates under them.

  The cities, taken to the stars by hydrogen bomb explosions under the pusher-plates, one per second for seven minutes to achieve Earth orbit…and then the Orions sent to all points of the astrolabe, to seed Man through the dark. The cities were gone, and their going had contaminated the Earth’s atmosphere beyond purification. But it did not matter: the Earth would die within the hour.

  He stood in the center of the arts rotunda, the last works of Konstantin Xenakis forming and re-forming across the dome, silver and gold threads patterning a hundred times a minute, and the small—but very clear, very distinct—voice of the Orion fleet flagship spoke in his head.

  “It’s on the way. An hour, perhaps.”

  Brooks found himself looking up when answering. “Have you been getting what I’m sending?”

  “Copying.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. That’s what I meant. Copying.”

  The voice from space grew milder. “No, I’m sorry. So used to techtalk…you just put it any way you want, Mr. Brooks.

  “We’re getting it all. Very clearly. It’s fine, just fine. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, just wanted you to know there was no change.”

&
nbsp; “Thank you.”

  The voice, and any whisper of its presence, vanished from his head, and he knew he was alone once more. Alone—with the entire population of the Earth listening, watching.

  He strolled out of the rotunda and stood on the speakers’ shelf overlooking the pastel gardens.

  “The sky is very blue,” he said. “I’ve never seen it so blue. Water, all the way to Heaven. But there are no birds.” His eyes recorded everything: the swaying, pastel trees that picked up the breeze and passed it on. Their colors, merging one into another with delicate softness.

  “Here is a poem for you, whomever.”

  He composed swiftly, the lines falling into place in his mind an instant before he spoke them.

  Vastator, destroyer from the cold,

  Eating time at fifty thousand kilometers per second,

  I won’t even see your approach.

  Outer dark sent you, my Sun hides you,

  And when your hunger takes you past,

  You will drop only eight minutes of leftovers

  From your terrible table.

  He shook his head. It was an inadequate piece of work. He tried to make amends: “The buildings are like metal grain in the sunlight. Pinpoints of light flickering like novae in crosstar filters. They are very lovely. But there are no sounds of people. The city seems to be waiting for your return. Poor dumb thing, a dog that doesn’t know its master has died. It will wait until it dies, too. Did you ever understand that cities only live with people in them?”

  He pressed the stud on his floater pack and rose slowly from the shelf. The central gardens of the city did not end abruptly, but diffused themselves into the main arterial passages leading away from the center. No street was empty of life, even now. He floated over the commercial center.

  “The robots continue their work,” he said. “Little persons of metal and plastic. I’ve always had a good feeling about them. Do you know why? They ask so little, and they do so much. They’re so kind no one would think of being cruel to them, so they lead the best of lives. They are content in their work. Even with all of us gone, they keep the wheels of commerce turning. How fortunate we were to have had them working with us.”