The Birthgrave (58 page)

I followed him then, and was absorbed also into the web of light. He walked about the gently purring column, stroking it with one hand. Panels ignited and darkened.

“In here,” he murmured fondly, “endless knowledge, balanced judgment, and the intimate details of every life aboard this ship. We are at present fifty-two men. Each of our minds has a replica inside this metal covering, a much finer and more accurate mind than the one we carry inside our skulls. Every detail of our experience is caught here, the truth as it happened to us not as we
think
it happened after twenty years of forgetting. Babies cry in this column, boys climb trees, and fall in love, and dream of the spacemen they long to become. Fifty-two unblurred memories.” He paused and looked at me. “And of course, now yours also.”

Tangled in the web, my skin chilled stiffly.

“Mine? I am not of your worlds. How can I be—in there?”

“Because your brain contacted, overruled even, the brain of the computer. To serve you, it had to understand you, as it has to understand the crew of the ship, in order to serve them. That is the way in which it was built. Imagine,” he said, “imagine that one year ago you were given a wonderful food on some far planet, and you
thought
it had a certain taste of this and that, but you had forgotten, and were wrong. The food which the computer brought you would also be wrong. Allow it to penetrate your mind, and find what it
really
tasted like one year ago, and it can give you what you want. That is perhaps a frivolous example, but the basic principle holds true from a chosen meal to a man lying injured and unconscious and in need of help.”

“So,” I said, very softly, as if I might keep the thing from hearing me, “all my thought, memory, every atom of my life—is known to your computer.”

“Yes,” Ciorden said. “Known better than you know it yourself. You told me that your name, like your beginning, was lost. Inside this column nothing of you is lost. If you have a name, it is here, and the beginning of your life, which you have consciously forgotten, is remembered.”

My beginning. My child's life before I had woken under the Mountain. The things which came in dreams, the swan lakes, the marble stairways, the leaping evil of the flame. Panic filled me. I did not stop for a moment to think why. I turned to the doorway of the room to run away, and Rarm stood there, the doors shut behind him. I did not know how much he had heard. All of it, it seemed. His face appeared dark and emotionless and without compassion, the face of Vazkor.

“You tricked me here,” I said to Ciorden. “And you also,” I said to the man in the doorway. I was terrified. I gripped my shaking hands together. “I never thought you gods. Now I see you are truly men, with all the petty curiosity of men. If I have given my brain to your machine I will give nothing further to you. Let me go. I will be no part of your out-world experiments on a race you consider inferior to your own.”

“I'm afraid,” Rarm said, “that you can't leave this ship now. In the past few minutes we've lifted from the valley, and are now in orbit around your world.”

“I do not understand you,” I said. But I did.

“Ciorden,” Rarm said.

Ciorden brushed his hand along the column. The metal walls of the room melted. Only in a nightmare could I have believed such a thing to exist about me. On every side black skies filled with the searing white drops of stars. On every side, distance, the void, black walls pulling the soul outward through the eyes, to fall into limitless nothingness. And below, a bluish sphere hanging like a lantern. A world. The world that I had run through, which had seemed so solid and so huge to me.

The need to cling to something stable was unbearable. I turned to the metal pillar and hid my face against it, shutting my eyes, holding to it, as if to let go would be to send myself spinning into the black emptiness forever.

And under my hands, the pillar throbbed and whined.

3

Trees, growing from metallic channels in the floor, spread their green feathers against the high roof, dusted black feathers of shadows across the painted walls of this indoor garden of another planet. Elongated red flowers spilled like blood from urns of glass.

I sat among the flowers, smelling their strange scent, watching him look at me. I was not entirely sure how I had come here. There had been sound and burning lights, and alarms like the alarms of war. Their ship had responded to my horror until Ciorden presumably managed to quiet it. Then Rarm must have brought me to this place, as if these strange growing things could put an end to the hollow icy tension in the pit of my belly, which had come with the knowledge of the blackness all around me. I was glad to have inconvenienced them. Yet it was all the pleasure I had.

“You're a risk to my ship,” Rarm said. “Your mind holds a power which you can't or won't control. You could kill us all.”

“Then let me go.”

He came and sat beside me, and I turned away from him, staring at the red flowers.

“Let me go,” I repeated.

“Can't you see your own danger? Your life is misery to you. The computer can analyze all our minds, and that is what it has to say of you. If you let me, I can help you.”

“Why?”

“Not as an experiment, which is what you think.”

“I am,” I said, tasting the bitterness of the words, “inferior to your race.”

“Inferior is a word you misuse. Men of my worlds have watched your planet for many years, because it held men like themselves—human men. Primitive by our standards, perhaps. Our bloody struggles are in the past, yours are to come. Time is the barrier, only time. And time does not make superiors or inferiors, only differences. Let me help you.”

“What can you do?” I said coldly.

“Not what I can do. The computer.”

“No.”

“Why ‘No'? Ciorden believes there's an answer to this thing which locks you out from yourself—and the computer has it.”

“No.”

“Yes. Are you afraid to be answered?”

“I am afraid,” I said. “That is enough.”

“Of what?” He grasped my shoulders suddenly, turning me toward him, his hands insistent, strong, well-remembered.

“You are Darak,” I murmured. “Darak in the inn-room at Ankurum, in the dark tent on the South Road.”

“Through the computer, with the help of Ciorden as your intermediary,” he said levelly, “you can relive, in the space of a few hours, your life from the moment of your birth.”

“No,” I said. I began to cry. “Let me go.”

Abruptly he stood up.

“Then I must do it,” he said.

He turned toward the doors. I ran after him. I shouted at him and tried to hold him back, but I did not seem to have any strength. I did not want him to know me as I knew myself, could not bear it. And then there was a barrier between us. I could neither feel nor see it, but neither could I pass by it. He had reached the doors.

“Before,” he said, “I was unprepared for you. Now I take no chances. I am the captain of this ship, and my final instruction overrides even your powers. That instruction has been given. Without a contrary order from me, you will not be allowed to follow me, though you may return to your room. Any attempt to undermine the computer with emotion will result in your instant anesthesia. Do you understand me?”

“Please—” I said.

But the doors had shut behind him.

For a long time I lingered in that garden room. I touched the flowers and they opened briefly. The shadow of the trees stirred in a little artificial breeze.

My thoughts came spasmodically. I longed to hide myself, to seek out a death I could not achieve. Shame and despair and the unknown dread pulled me down.

Finally I left the garden, and it let me. In the corridor I realized I did not know the way back to my rooms. At once a beam of light struck down from the ceiling, pointing ahead of me. I walked toward it numbly, and it moved away. It led me through many corridors, and upward on another of the moving floors. Twice I passed a group of men, who fell silent as I went by them, following the beam. I sensed intense interest, and little liking. I was a danger to them, yet rare and curious for all that, like the orchids of the north which will snap off a man's finger for the meat. I reached the glassy place, crossed it, and entered the blue silence which was the only part of this ship I might be safe in.

The bed slid from the wall, and I went to it, my body heavy as lead.

I lay silent, thinking how he raped my mind in the light-webbed room. I thought of the emptiness and the void in me, terrible as the void which had swallowed the ship.

And then a new thought came, a little sharp thought, burning its way into my skull. I recalled what I had feared at their hands when they took me. Their power was vast, the power of the computer-brain seemed godlike.

“Kill me,” I whispered to the silence. “Let me die.”

A deep humming filled the room, a frenzied angry sound.

“Serve me,” I said. “Obey me. Death is what I want. Give me death.”

My bed trembled. There came the drone of distant thunder. A new, a limitless cold settled on me. My eyes darkened. Tears choked me. It had given me what I wanted. And perhaps it was strong enough, stronger than the swords of Vazkor's soldiers, more lasting than the grave in the desert, and the fallen tower at Eshkorek.

Something glittered through the dark. A knife swooping down on me from the light-glow of the ceiling. I felt my breathing stop.

* * *

“Wake up,” Darak said to me impatiently.

“Let me alone,” I muttered. “I am dead.”

“No, you're not dead,
goddess.
Drink this.”

Something forced itself under the fold of the shireen, and into my mouth. Thin cool fluid found my throat. I swallowed, and pushed the thing away. Without opening my eyes, I sat up. Whirling colors filled my brain. To escape them I opened my eyes after all. I saw the blue room, and could not remember where I was. I laughed stupidly at Darak's angry face. I could not understand why he was so angry.

“Dead.” He tried the word contemptuously on his tongue. “Didn't it occur to you that a machine especially programmed to bring comfort and life to its crew would also be programmed never to kill them? If you were a savage or a barbarian it would make some sense—but you can think and reason.” He stood up. “My whole ship damaged if I hadn't blocked you with that one inspired order. Anesthesia the moment you presented the computer with an emotional problem.” He leaned over, took my shoulders, and shook me violently. “Couldn't you trust me?”

“Darak,” I said.

“No, I'm not Darak Gold-Fisher, the hill-bandit charioteer. Neither am I Vazkor the murderer, the first successful step toward death and darkness that your planet has so far taken. I am Rarm Zavid, the fool. Up on your feet.” He lifted me, and held me upright. “Drink some more of this. Now walk.” We walked. I began to recall where I was and all that had happened. I tried very hard not to, but he would not allow me. Finally he let me go, and I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was strained, concentrated into a look of frustration and regret rather than anger. I remembered that he and Ciorden had lived in my mind in the Hub. And I hated them.

“Has my life brought you joy, Rarm?” I asked him, spitefully sweet in my shame.

“As much joy as it brought you, goddess.”

“Never call me that.”

“What, then, am I to call you? You say you have no name. No,” he said suddenly, “I shouldn't be angry with you.”

“You have no right to be angry. You had no right to my mind.”

He looked at me, and again the helpless anger caught his face, then faded.

“Listen,” he said. “One thing I learned; the flame—the creature you saw in the stone bowl, what you call Karrakaz—told you you would be free, would regain your beauty and your powers, when and if you found your soul-kin, the Jade. If I assured you that the computer holds the solution to that quest, would you do as I told you?”

My heart throbbed thickly. I stared at him.

“How—can it know?”

“Because
you
know. The answer is in your own mind. But it comes from the time before you woke under the volcano. That time—that short time—is all you have to relive in order to set yourself free forever.”

“I cannot believe you,” I whispered.

“Are you willing to let go by such a chance to find the Jade?”

I turned to him. Hate boiled in me. I gripped his arm.

“You tell me! You know!”

“I can't tell you. Not until you understand. You must come to the computer.”

I half turned toward the doorway, half ready to go with him. But the unreasoning fear rose and engulfed me.

“The computer,” I repeated. I took one stiff step forward, and my knees melted. I fell, and found I could not get up. I could not move my legs, my feet, my arms or hands. Paralyzed, deadened, I cried out to him in despair. My eyes were almost blind: I could hardly speak. “Karrakaz,” I choked out, knowing now that the Jade lay within my reach, and that, seeing this, the demon of my race had risen to deprive me of it. “Karrakaz will destroy me.”

“No,” he said, though his voice seemed distant and almost meaningless. He had picked me up, but, numbed, deafened, blinded, in an incredible extremity of terror, I could not follow what happened to me, or where he took me, and at last the horrible darkness swept in like the hungry sea, and drowned me, and bore me away into itself, and I was lost.

4

Birth is pain. All emotions of sorrow, fear, and anguish begin in that struggle and rejection. After birth the world is abstract, senseless, yet peculiarly orderly. Nothing is logical, therefore illogicality is rational and sane. Suck, sleep, silences and sounds fill and refill a distorted plane where colors slide on the unfocused eyes. There is no time, yet time passes.