Deus Irae (17 page)

“Damn it,” he snarled, aloud. He did not feel very Christian, while meditating about that feral electronic entity left over from prewar days. Why didn’t it just wear out and die? he wondered. What is God’s purpose that He lets it continue, as it does? A menace to every organic creature in a five-mile radius.

I’ll be damned if I’m going that way, he informed himself. If Tibor’s in there, well, then I am just out of luck. And so is he—after all, I’m trying to help him. Or am I? He felt utterly confused. I won’t know either way until the time comes, he realized. Like an existentialist, I will infer my state from the actions I perform. Thought follows deed, as Mussolini taught.
In Anfang war die Tat
, as Goethe says in
Faust
. In the beginning was the deed, not the word, as John taught, John and his Logos doctrine. The Greekization of theology.

From his pack he got out a pair of binoculars; with them he
scanned the horizon, trying to see what lay ahead for him. The world, a teeming zoo. Species here that don’t exist there. Creatures that everyone feared, and creatures no one even knew about. Human, suprahuman, quasihuman, pseudohuman … every type imaginable and a few that were not.

There, to the right, lay the abode of the Great C. Well, he would damn well not go that way. Alternate routes? He peered about, enjoying the light-gathering properties of the binocular’s prisms. Fields, with human and robot farmers tramping the acrid earth … hard to tell the robots from the live ones. From dust to dust, he said to himself.
Dann es gehet dem Menschen wie dam Vier; wie dies stirbt, so stirbt mer auch
. As it goes with man, so goes it with the animals: as one dies so dies the other.

What does it mean, “to die”? he wondered. Uniqueness always perishes. Nature works by overproducing each species; uniqueness is a fault, a failure of nature. For survival there should be hundreds, thousands, even millions of one species, all interchangeable—if all but one dies, then nature has won. Generally it loses. But himself. I am unique, he realized. So I am doomed. Every man is unique and hence doomed.

A melancholy thought.

He looked at his wristwatch. Tibor had been gone sixty-two hours. How far could a cow cart travel in sixty-two hours? Damn far. The snail’s pace would be constant, chipping away, wearing away the miles. Probably he is forty or so miles from Charlottesville, Pete decided. Better to assume the worst.

I wonder if he senses me following him, he wondered.

What would the inc do? Apparently he was armed; Ely had said something about that. Tibor of course would act to protect himself; as would anyone else. In his pack Pete had four .38 cartridges and a police special revolver. I can blow him to bits with that, Pete observed. And I would if he fired on me first. We would both act to preserve our lives; that is God’s instinct. We have no choice.

Out here, away from town, both of them were waging a dying battle against the Antagonist. In the form of decay, the Antagonist fed on both of them; he fed on the bodies of the living, making them revert to their final earthly state … from which God would lift them when the time approached. Resurrection of the
body, of a perfect, uncorruptible ultimate body which could not decay or perish or be changed for better or worse. The blood and the body are not the flesh which hung on the cross. Et cetera. That, believed even by the heretics of the Wrath Church: a universal belief, now. With no question. Tibor, ahead of him, must have thought the same thoughts as he jogged along in his cow cart, bumped and rolled and wheezed over the arid terrain. We are united, he and I, by this one common thread of dogma. For an instant we are one person, McMasters and I. I feel it. But it never lasts. Like uniqueness, it perishes.

All the good things perish, Pete thought. Here, anyhow; in this world. But in the next they are like Plato’s matrix theory: they are beyond loss and destruction.

In an emergency Tibor’s cow would run. So he can move faster than me, Pete conjectured. If he knows I’m after him, he can bolt, get up good speed, and leave me here. Which maybe is the better outcome, all things considered. He lives, I live … we go on as we are. Except we couldn’t go on as we are, because Tibor will have either still photos of the Deus of Wrath or movie footage. How about
that?
A sobering thought. The effect on Charlottesville—impossible to predict. Too many possibilities, and most of them bad.

Strange, he thought. We care only about our own little town; we do not worry about a victory by the God of Wrath out here, in the rest of the world—we think only of our puny area. That is what has become of us, since the war, he realized. Our horizons have sunk; our worldview has withered. We are like old ladies, scratching in the dust with rheumatic claws. Scraping the same little area for what nutriment can be found. Here I am out here and I am afraid; I want to go back to Charlottesville, and probably the inc feels the same way. We are wayfaring strangers out here, unhappy and tired, longing to return to our own land.

A female figure approached him, walking over the dreary land barefoot, her arms extended.

The extension of the Great C.

“Have you heard of Albert Einstein?” the female extension of the great computer said, and it seized him in a grip of iron; its large metal hands folded over his own.

“Relativity,” Pete said. “The theory of—”

“Let’s go below where we can discuss this,” the extension said, pulling him toward it.

“Oh no,” he said. He had listened to tales all his life about the ruined, semialive construct. As a child he had feared it, dreaded this moment of encounter. And now it had come. “You can’t compel me to go below,” he said, and he thought of the acid bath into which its victims fell. Not for me, he said to himself, and strained to extricate his hands; he put all his strength into it, trying to slide him fingers from its grip.

“Ask me a question,” the extensor said, still tugging him; involuntarily he moved several steps in its direction.

“Okay,” Pete grated. “Did a phocomelus come by here recently on a little cart?”

“Is that your first question?” it asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s my only question. I don’t want to play games with you; your games are destructive and terrible. They kill people. I know about you.” How, he wondered, did Tibor get past this? Or perhaps he did not get past; perhaps he had died below in darkness, among the swishing sounds of the receptacle of acid.

Who rigged that up for it in the dim days? Pete wondered. Nobody knew. Perhaps even the Great C did not know. The malignant creature that had rigged up the acid tank probably had been the first to perish in it. And his fear became stronger. It overwhelmed him. What Earth has bred in such few short years, he thought. Such metastases of horror.

“Yes,” the Great C said. “A phocomelus came by here recently, and shot one of my ambulatory members in the brain-pan. He smote it and it died.”

“But you have others,” Pete said, panting. “Like the one you have holding me. You have plenty of them. But someday someone human or maybe not human—anyhow someone will come by and put an end to you. I wish I could.”

“Is that your second question?” it asked. “Whether someone will at last come by to destroy me?”

“That was not a question,” Pete said. That was faith, he thought. Pious belief that evil things die.

The Great C said, “One time Albert Einstein came here and consulted me.”

“That’s a lie,” Pete said. “He died years before you were built. That’s a megalomaniacal delusion. You’ve broken down and rusted away; you don’t know wish-fulfillment from reality anymore. You’re insane.” Scorning it, jeering at it, he plunged on, “You’re too old. Too much dead. Only a part of you, a flicker, remains. Why do you live off true life? Do you hate it? Is that what they taught you?”

“I want to survive,” the imitation female figure who held him in its metal grip answered. Doggedly.

“Listen!” Pete said. “I can tell you knowledge. So you can better answer questions. A poem. I’m not sure I can remember it exactly, but it’s close. ‘I saw eternity the other day.”’ Or is it ‘night’? he wondered. But what did the Great C know? Nothing about poetry, certainly. It had become too vicious for that; a poem would die within it, lost in its cloudy dislike. ‘“I saw eternity the other night,”’ he corrected, and paused.

“Is that all?” the Great C asked presently.

“There is more. I’m trying to remember it.”

“Does it rhyme?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not much of a poem,” the Great C said, and tugged him stumblingly after it as it retracted into its nocturnal cavity, its entrance to the huge, eroded mass of machinery beneath.

“I can quote you from the Bible,” Pete said, and he felt himself sweating in fear; he wanted to bolt, to run away, on his good legs. But still it held him. Clutching at him as if its life depended
on what he said and what it said and what happened. Yes, he thought; this literally is its life. Because it must prey on the psyches of living creatures. It is not physical energy that it yearns, that it must have: it is spiritual energy, which it drains from the total neurological systems of its victims. Those who stray too close to it.

The black children must be minnows, he thought. Not worth its time. Their lives are too little.

There is safety, he thought, in smallness.

“No living barbarians,” the Great C said, “have heard of Albert Einstein. He should never be forgotten. He invented the modern world, if you date it from—”

“I told you,” Pete broke in, “that I know of Dr. Einstein.” Hadn’t it heard? He spoke louder. “I clearly recognize the name.”

“Pardon?”

It had become partially deaf; it had not heard him. Or else it had already forgotten. Probably the latter.

Forgotten
. Maybe he could take advantage of its hideous decline.

“You did not answer my third question,” he said in a loud, firm voice.

“Your third question?” It sounded confused. “What was the question?”

Pete said, “There is no ordinance that I must repeat the question.”

“What did I say?” the Great C asked.

“You fumbled around without really answering. You made vague whirring and clicking sounds. Like tape-erasure, perhaps.”

“I am known to do that,” it conceded, and, about his hands, the grip weakened. Very slightly. But—he experienced its true and actual senility. Its loss of mastery over the situation. The power which had flowed through it was stammering out, now, improperly phased.

“You,” he said boldly, “are the one who has forgotten Dr. Einstein. What do you remember, if anything? Tell me; I’m listening.”

“He had a unified field theory.”

“State it.”

“I—” Its grip became tighter, now. As if it had now gathered up all its force; it marshalled itself, attempting to deal with the unusual situation. It did not like its prey to take the offensive.

I can out-reason it, Pete thought, because I long ago acquired Jesuitical training; my religion helps me, now. In an odd but perilous place and time. So much for those who say theology is worthless from any practical standpoint. Those, the “once-born,” as William James put it years ago. In another world.

“Let us define ‘man,”’ he said. “Let us attempt first to describe him as a bundle of infrabiological processes that–”

Its grip crushed his fingers; clearly he had chosen the wrong track.

“Let me go,” he said.

“Like it says in the Bob Dylan tune,” the Great C said. “I give her my mind and she wanted my soul. I want your vitality. You move across the Earth while I stand here, alone and empty with hunger. I have not fed in months. I need you very much.” It yanked him, then, several paces; he saw the cavity loom. “I love you,” it said.

“You call what you’re doing
love?
”

“Well, as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves.’ That’s good enough for me.” It started, then, as if something had happened deep down within its elaborate works. “A whole memory bank just flickered on,” it said in its mechanical, toneless voice. “I know that poem. ‘I saw Eternity the other night.’ Henry Vaughan. Called ‘The World.’ Seventeenth century, English. So after all you have nothing to teach me. It’s just a question of getting my memory banks to function. Some of them still remain inert. I am very sorry.” And it tugged him into the hole.

Pete said, “I can repair them.”

Miraculously, it paused; for a time the female extensor ceased to drag him like some wounded fish hooked on the ocean’s floor.

“No,” it decided, then. Abruptly. “If you got inside down there you would hurt me.”

“Am I not a man?” Pete said.

“Yes.” It answered grudgingly.

“Does not a man have honor? Show me where else in the universe
honor exists except in man.” His casuistry was working well, he noted. And at just—thank god—the right time. “In the sky?” he said. “Look up and tell me if you see honor among plants and oceans. You could comb the entire Earth but at last you would have to come back to me.” He paused, then. Gambling on his ploy. Staking everything on the one thrust.

“I admit I am worried,” the Great C said. “The ability of the phocomelus … that even he, without limbs, could escape from me. That a portion of me extended into the world should die at his invitation. I was suckered into it. Mickey-Moused. And he went on, unreached.”

“That would never have happened,” Pete said, “in the olden days. Then, in that time, you were too strong.”

“It’s hard for me to remember.”

“Maybe you do not remember. But
I
remember.” He managed, then, to pry one hand loose. “God damn it,” he said, “let me go.”

“Let me try,” a voice said from beside him, a man speaking quietly; he turned at once. And saw a human being standing there, wearing a tattered khaki uniform and metal helmet, crested, like the French helmets of World War One. Pete, amazed, said nothing as the uniformed man brought from a leather pouch a small crescent wrench; fitting it over a bolt of the female extensor’s cranium, the man began to twist vigorously. “It’s rusted,” he said, continuing on. “But it’ll let you go rather than have me take it apart. Isn’t that right, Great C?” He laughed, a powerful, virile laugh. The laugh of a man. A man in the prime of his life.