New Writings in SF 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Then, as his signal began to fade, on a planet of a star four and a third light years away, a mind became aware, fleetingly, of an alien presence.

  He smiled and was content.

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  * * * *

  THE LIBERATORS

  Lee Harding

  In the far distant future the City roamed the face of Earth, its memory banks conjuring fantasies from the minds of the unhumans stored within its vitals. Almost omnipotent, it was yet growing old and senile, and slow to meet the threat of the new life stirring upon the face of the world.

  * * * *

  They tumbled blindly through the endless twilight of the tunnel under The World, pallid little creatures with faces like polished pebbles washed smooth by time, and pursued by a growing sense of guilt.

  Malo wondered if it was because they were leaving the City, and if their sudden exodus could be construed as a gross betrayal.

  But the Poet had said: “Your responsibility is to yourselves—not to a machine. And least of all to the City.”

  And this much they believed, this much they had come to accept: that the City was no master but a servile mechanism corrupted by a strange megalomania, and that their destinies had been founded ages ago upon individual human liberty and not upon integration with a non-organic entity.

  Wild, impossible heresies—yet they had come to know them as the truth.

  But the ties of centuries were not easily broken, and that explained her uneasiness. It seemed likely now that the Poet had, by the very stealth of his movements, offended the great City and aroused the antagonism she could sense in the dank air about them. Even the gloomy walls of the tunnel exuded a faint, drawn-out sigh as they flashed by and quiet weeping pursued the vacuum of their passage.

  The City did not wish them to go.

  And why not? she asked herself. We are the last to leave. When we are gone it will be alone and without purpose...

  Why shouldn’t it resent their departure ?

  * * * *

  There were five of them, a straggling line of limbless ovoids spun out like a necklace behind the Poet, moving swiftly down the ancient passageways towards an unimaginable destination far removed from the false fabrications the City had thrust into their weak and willing minds.

  Malo watched him moving ahead of them, marvelling at the way his great golden legs pushed down against, but never quite touched, the dark floor of the tunnel. Like two impatient pistons driving them forward, when in all sanity they should have perished long ago at the time they had been so rudely ripped from their comfortable wombs.

  Ah, how strange, she thought. How very, very strange Life had become since the arrival of the Poet...

  * * * *

  Existence had been a simple matter, unencumbered by the need for decisions. Her function, as the City’s biological memory, was supreme above all others. All that mankind had ever been lay buried in the rich darkness of her racial memory, and while the City nursed and nurtured her frail little body her mind dwelt for ever in a cycloramic past which somehow provided sustenance for the vast machine, for without Malo’s gift there would have been ... no Purpose. It would lie abandoned and lifeless like so many of its kind.

  Once, long ago, the City had been a nomad, wandering the empty face of the Earth looking for some small trace of the race that had deserted it ages before. That had been a lonely time, moving slowly and with great patience over the rich green crust of the land until each small inch was engraved for ever upon massive memory banks and there was not one small quarter of the empty globe that remained unfamiliar.

  Had it not been wise beyond the capabilities of those other desolated machines it, too, might have sundered and collapsed under a burden of No Purpose, but some savage quest kept it alive and functioning—and growing. That was the most important facet of its existence. When others had crumbled into ruin it had refined and extended its functions until it was possible for the inorganic mind of the City to extrapolate and perform feats far in advance of any machine previously conceived by man.

  When it could move the quest was taken farther—to the very ends of the deserted Earth. Lonely and pressed beyond all abilities ever endowed upon metal and plastic, it finally tired of its senseless task and returned to the land. Its mighty mass fastened once more to the ageless breast of the world, it waited for the ages to pass and for true consciousness to generate within hungry cybernetic cells. And then, one day, it began to Dream.

  * * * *

  Not all of the people had left. For some time it had been aware of a few faint candles of organic life flickering pitifully in forgotten corners of the incredibly complex machine. They had been beyond the reach of the City but now, rested and secure at last, it began the long process of activating every cell of its structure into full awareness. Ages passed. Many centuries, perhaps, before this was accomplished and the City throbbed throughout its massive bulk with a vibrant awareness in excess of any it had previously known. Only then was the location of the Dreamers made possible.

  They slept in their cells like pale, moist little moths, their minds made weak and flimsy by centuries of dwelling and drifting through the bright lands of their fashioning: relics of a race who had forgotten their existence and would hardly have cared if they had not, for the Dreamers were the Dead. The ones who had traded a rich and full life for the tempting fantasies of their own subconscious—and this but one of the many cul-de-sacs from which the race had fled.

  And the Dreamers, the immortal slumberers, slept on through the ages.

  At first the City probed warily about its discovery. Before it could actively engage the guttering minds of these creatures it would have to create new techniques and new tools for the impossible task it had set itself. In the meantime it could only strengthen and maintain the conditions necessary for the continued survival of the Dreamers, so that this precious cargo might not be lost before the necessary techniques were perfected.

  It did not take long. Seemingly unsurmountable problems fell one after the other beneath the battering ram of the City’s remorseless logic, and when, for the first time, it entered the world of the Dreamers it was as a gently moving breeze that fails to disturb even the most frail of grasses.

  In many minds it found only madness and corruption. Cells deteriorated beyond any possible hope of repair (there were still some things beyond the control of a machine) and there were others whose minds existed only as pale, greyish clouds in the awful stillness of their tombs. From these it withdrew and, loath to destroy even flesh as senile as this, closed heavy shutters around the useless creatures and nursed and nurtured them for the far future—when even protoplasm without a mind might have some use.

  But there was eventual reward.

  From the moment it first crept into the rich darkness of Malo’s thoughts it knew that here was something beyond even its wildest imaginings—a mind that was not only whole and undamaged by the centuries spent Dreaming, but one capable of recalling the entire history of a race. The concept was staggering—and the implications equally endless.

  What it had been until then had been taught by man.

  What it had once thought of as a beginning now became but a clumsy splice in history.

  All of this unrolled like a timeless film inside the creature’s soft skull, stretching back towards the dim infinity of mankind’s emergence on the land and the beginning of the long evolutionary journey. Those distant times were vague and ill-defined, but the City knew that with time and patience even those dim images would be made as real and as vital as those of the recent past.

  And it was from this vast tapestry the City forged a plan of development it would have once thought impossible. With the help of this and other minds it had found it hoped to end some way of bridging the gap between organic life and its own.

  In the beginning there was much confusion and much pain. A machine has no use for emotions. A machine has no soul. And a machine cannot Dream. Yet it coveted these things that it f
ound in the mind of Malo. The race had deserted it without bestowing the ultimate gift of Life upon their creation—now it would finish a clumsy effort by uniting itself with flesh and mind and soul.

  Before the awakening it spun a subtle and cruel web to ensnare the captive minds. One by one it roused them and fastened their thoughts to its snare, so that although they had left their own dreams behind they now shared a new one created for them by the City. And who was to cry: devil? They had never been alive—it had merely traded them one Dream for another, only in this case it was a Dream with a Purpose—the City’s. And so it crept into their minds, and enslaved them, and sucked at the rich juice of their thoughts, and became a parasite.

  * * * *

  Malo never knew the meaning of loneliness. She had many companions-in-mind. There was Bael who bred for the City and Antar who slept, ate and excreted in the manner of his ancestors and to the satisfaction of the City, and there were others whose functions were not quite important. Through Anita the eager machine could enjoy the delight of the human bloodstream and by entering the feeble mind of Primo could explore the fascinating world of insanity—the concept of not-sane being of particular interest to the City. By integrating these helpless little human relics into its cybernetic heart it imagined itself something better than the machines which had preceded it. Something that was not quite a complex structure of metals and electricity—and something not quite human, either. It was, simply, the City. Only ... different.

  Sometimes they were even allowed the Dream—but for the City’s enlightenment—and even in Dreaming Malo was supreme above all others. Not for her the muddled, incoherent pictures of the others but vivid, grand illusions such as the City had never believed possible. Oh, the wildest, most fanciful things cropped into her mind! And she could make her master laugh and cry and puzzled in turn by the impossible absurdity of her Dreaming—and many were the shades of mood and emotion that suffused the delicate stuff of her sleeping mind and remained beyond the City’s comprehension, so that it would sometimes fall again to brooding and to contemplating The Gulf that sternly insisted to be.

  * * * *

  She had been Dreaming when the Poet arrived. Building a sparkling phantasm of slender creatures moving indolently through a darkened deep, now phosphorescent with life forms rich and strange from the bottomless ragbag of her racial memory.

  An unwanted turbulence had disturbed the delicate substance of her Dream, sent fish and foliage flying willy-nilly about her. Bewildered, she sought explanation from the City and watched with alarm a milky translucence begin to spread throughout her mind, swallowing the dark wonder of her thoughts and leaving her head full of no-thoughts. ’

  And then she felt something grotesque move into her mind. Something with the form and sense of a man and yet—not quite so.

  A giant!

  Large and gross of feature—like something from the primeval past.

  She moved suddenly away from the intruder and studied him curiously. Her mind insisted that this was, beyond question, a bipedal man of the dim past. Gross folds of flesh covered a naked body disfigured by deformed extremities— and it stood upright on two incredibly long legs, unsupported in any way she could determine.

  And all this ascertained in the fraction of an instant Malo found necessary, a moment poised clumsily between the assimilation of fresh knowledge and effective action.

  Too long.

  The giant was upon her in a single movement, had taken possession of her faltering mind and was about to perform some violent action outside of her world ...

  He stretched out a hand and with his fingertips gently pierced her silver shell of comfort...

  ... and a great darkness crashed down upon her and washed out her thoughts. She plunged into an oblivion more complete and final than she would have ever thought possible.

  Tumbled forward, a deafened and blinded and insensible ovoid.

  And the giant caught her in his arms and smiled down upon her. “Come with me, little one,” he said, “and I will teach you to walk.”

  The first words to sunder the dreadful darkness that had overtaken her.

  * * * *

  The pain was momentary and minimal. The darkness became a comfort and not a terror, and, once her mind had been readied, a brilliant sea of images.

  She had prized her remarkable memory—but she now found that there was much she had yet to learn. What she had thought of as an awareness was now only a half-way thing. She had lived a lie set upon her consciousness by the great machine and now all that was gone.

  It was like waking from a long and unpleasant Dream to find the Truth waiting patiently to be grasped by her unsteady mind. But with the Poet to guide her she found that she could live a hundred lifetimes in an instant of the City’s lime, and in that moment she found that she could see quite clearly how they had been deprived of their birthright and robbed of their gifts. She had thought that within her mind rested all that mankind had ever been—because the City had told her so. But now she saw how the City had bled her memories and fed back only those which it thought necessary for its purposes and that the accumulated information of millenia had become outdated in this one blinding instant of real awareness.

  How long? she wondered. How long has this been so? How long had they been held captive by the City, chastened and embalmed like moths in one monstrous lump of cankerous amber?

  She felt as if she was being made over again, her tiny body tingling with unfamiliar sensations and her eager mind buzzing with extraordinary impatience. Then the images faded and the darkness returned. With the return to stasis came the first command, “Open your eyes, Malo.”

  And a question. Hers: what were eyes? And how were they ... opened?

  Her own lightning swift recall anticipated the Poet’s prompting and she remembered what she had to do. But her regenerating flesh was still inadequate for the task involved. It was left for the friendly giant to find the energy necessary to accomplish even this small function.

  Her eyes but two narrow clefts marring the smooth contour of her bald skull, where lashless lids stammered, made hesitant movements above the inanimate flesh of her soft face. A determined effort by passive nerves and muscle to perform the necessary function.

  Malo opened her eyes.

  Focus came gradually and then she saw the grotesque shape looming over her. She beheld the Poet outside her World. So huge, so terrifying.

  Her fear was erased before it had time to build into terror. She felt only warmth and friendliness from the stranger who had opened her mind and she saw how the raw mental wound left by her abrupt severance from the City had quickly healed and left her young mind sane and whole. Now she was ready for the steady flow of words the giant dropped tenderly into her head to accompany the fresh rush of pictures.

  Wordswordswordswordswords. Tumbling about in her mind like squirming fishes. Thought processes once limited by the designs of the City now struggled to master a forgotten method of oral communication: human speech. The dry dust of words that had always laid at the very bottommost level of her racial memory.

  “I have come to take you away from here,” the Poet said. “Away from the City, to where you and your people were meant to live. I’m taking you home, Malo.”

  Even now that word had very special connotations.

  And as he spoke her eyes followed the movements of his lips, while her mind followed the motion of his thoughts. She tried to emulate their movements and was dismayed by the babble that escaped from her own lipless mouth.

  The giant smiled. “Have patience, little one. One cannot undo the work of eons in the space of a moment. There is no need to force yourself. Words are the great gift of Man —but there are times when they may be dispensed with to advantage. So relax—and listen to what I have to say. The rest will come in good time.”

  * * * *

  To facilitate her comprehension still farther there remained one final adjustment and while her brain fumbled to absorb the conce
pt involved the process of interpenetration was begun and completed. She felt a soft, warm splinter of the Poet slide smoothly into her mind and when this was done she hung frail and helpless on the gigantic loom of the giant’s psyche. The brightness and the sense of power was breathtaking—and now there was no longer any difficulty in communication.

  “I will show you freedom,” he whispered.

  A vast plain filled her being, stretched as far away as her eyes could see. Sunlight scorched the green land and a soft, hazy line of mountains limned the far horizon. Before her, in the very foreground of her vision, a small group of the golden giants. And among them, a smaller, and hauntingly familiar figure. He smiled, and waved to her an affectionate greeting. “Hullo, Malo. Remember me?”