Part 1 (1/2)
Alone Against Tomorrow.
HARLAN ELLISON.
Introduction.
The Song of the Soul.
Carl Jung once said, ”The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.” He could not have been more correct. We have only to look around us, at the fissures in the rock-wall of our times, to know that we have created for ourselves a madhouse of irrationality and despair. The lunacies of our world erupt daily like boils on the diseased body of civilization. Is it, hopefully, the reawakening of conscience, or, more likely, the refracted pain of denying our souls?
Alienation.
The keyword so easily bandied by sociologists and inept novelists alike. The explanation for racial strife, random violence, ma.s.s madness, the rape of our planet. Man feels cut off. He feels denied. He feels alone. He is alienated.
If one more quotation might be permitted, the words of Oscar Wilde-himself a cla.s.sic study of alienation-serve to describe alienation: ”To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experience is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul.”
Alone against his world, the man of today finds his G.o.ds have deserted him, his brother has grown fangs, the machine clatters ever nearer on his heels, fear is the only lover demanding his clasp, and without answers he turns and turns, and finds only darkness.
The creative intellect struggles against this sorry reality. Pressing with unflagging intensity against the shuddering membrane of alienation, against the interface between himself and freedom of the soul, the artist tries to gain an exit with the magics of words and movements and colors. Yet all around him the inexorable inertia of the alienated society finds the strength to keep rolling, grinding, crus.h.i.+ng. It would seem only the mind of the madman is free.
And even so, the artist persists. He speaks of man, alone in the night, alone against the stars, alone against tomorrow-more starless and darker than even today. He speaks of worlds beyond our world, days beyond our days, places cross-when and never-will-be, in hopes that cautions may be flung on the wind and somehow still be heard.
These are stories I have written over the past ten years and more. Stories in which the theme of alienation dominates. They are by no means stories of hopelessness; for in examples of the d.a.m.ned and lost, we find hope within ourselves. Alienated, perhaps; yet never alone.
HARLAN ELLISON.
Los Angeles, January, 1970
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
LIMP, THE BODY OF GORRISTER hung from the pink palette; unsupported-hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not s.h.i.+ver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine.
Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.
Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo fetish, and was afraid for the future. ”Oh G.o.d,” he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. ”Why doesn't it just do-us-in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this.”
It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.
He was speaking for all of us.
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because it liked to amuse itself with strange sounds) hallucinated that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. ”It's another shuck,” I told them. ”Like the G.o.ddam frozen elephant it sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We'll hike all that way and it'll be putrified or some d.a.m.n thing. I say forget it. Stay here; it'll have to come up with something pretty soon or we'll die.”
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn't be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much. Hot, cold, raining, lava, boils or locust-it never mattered: the machine m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. ”I've got to have something, Ted. Maybe there'll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let's try it.”
I gave in easily. What the h.e.l.l. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. The machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us. And she never climaxed, so why bother.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The pa.s.sage of time was important; not to us sure as h.e.l.l, but to it. Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other's wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn't matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and on the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing it had materialized, it sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.
On the third day we pa.s.sed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carca.s.ses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with his own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: he strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him-now long since gone to dust-could ever have hoped.
There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we didn't try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only the five of us, down here inside, alone with AM I heard Ellen saying, frantically, ”No, Benny! Don't, come on, Benny, don't please!”
And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes.
He was saying, ”I'm gonna get out, I'm gonna get out...” over and over. His monkeylike face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the ”festival” were drawn down into a ma.s.s of pink-white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.
But even though we could call AM any d.a.m.ned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.
Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand- over-hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.
”Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before-” She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.
It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him, when whatever was going to happen, happened.
And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during his mad period, it was not merely his face he had made like a giant ape. He was big in the privates, she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine pure Ellen, oh Ellen the clean! Sc.u.m filth.
Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventy-five years ago. Gorrister kicked her in the side.
Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light, something that began to glow from Benny's eyes, and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mewl like a wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his shoulders hunched together, his back humped, as though he were trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk's. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey-face pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out, it cut through easily. The pain s.h.i.+vered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.
And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet.
The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate steel floor with a crash.
He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound spiraled up out of normal range.
Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and he was left lying there, crying piteously.
His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly. AM had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and myself...we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face.