The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (37 page)

“Mix drinks with drugs,” Okubara said witheringly. “Ruin career. I see it happen many times. Get lost.”

Unsteadily, he walked toward the great central door of the Yangtze River villa; two servants, dressed like medieval knights, with crested plumes, ceremoniously opened the door for him and one of them said, “Good night, sir.”

“Up yours,” Chien said, and passed out into the night.

At a quarter to three in the morning, as he sat sleepless in the living room of his conapt, smoking one Cuesta Rey Astoria after another, a knock sounded at the door.

When he opened it he found himself facing Tanya Lee in her trenchcoat, her face pinched with cold. Her eyes blazed, questioningly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said roughly. His cigar had gone out; he relit it. “I’ve been looked at enough,” he said.

“You saw it,” she said.

He nodded.

She seated herself on the arm of the couch and after a time she said, “Want to tell me about it?”

“Go as far from here as possible,” he said. “Go a long way.” And then he remembered: no way was long enough. He remembered reading that too. “Forget it,” he said; rising to his feet, he walked clumsily into the kitchen to start up the coffee.

Following after him, Tanya said, “Was—it that bad?”

“We can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win; I don’t mean me. I’m not in this; I just wanted to do my job at the Ministry and forget it. Forget the whole damned thing.”

“Is it non-terrestrial?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“Is it hostile to us?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. Both. Mostly hostile.”

“Then we have to—”

“Go home,” he said, “and go to bed.” He looked her over carefully; he had sat a long time and he had done a great deal of thinking. About a lot of things. “Are you married?” he said.

“No. Not now. I used to be.”

He said, “Stay with me tonight. The rest of tonight, anyhow. Until the sun comes up.” He added, “The night part is awful.”

“I’ll stay,” Tanya said, unbuckling the belt of her raincoat, “but I have to have some answers.”

“What did Dryden mean,” Chien said, “about music untuning the sky? I don’t get that. What does music do to the sky?”

“All the celestial order of the universe ends,” she said as she hung her raincoat up in the closet of the bedroom; under it she wore an orange striped sweater and stretch-pants.

He said, “And that’s bad?”

Pausing, she reflected. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“It’s a lot of power,” he said, “to assign to music.”

“Well, you know that old Pythagorean business about the ‘music of the spheres.’ ” Matter-of-factly she seated herself on the bed and removed her slipperlike shoes.

“Do you believe in that?” he said. “Or do you believe in God?”

“ ‘God’!” She laughed. “That went out with the donkey steam engine. What are you talking about? God, or god?” She came over close beside him, peering into his face.

“Don’t look at me so closely,” he said sharply drawing back. “I don’t ever want to be looked at again.” He moved away, irritably.

“I think,” Tanya said, “that if there is a God He has very little interest in human affairs. That’s my theory, anyhow. I mean, He doesn’t seem to care if evil triumphs or people or animals get hurt and die. I frankly don’t see Him anywhere around. And the Party has always denied any form of—”

“Did you ever see Him?” he asked. “When you were a child?”

“Oh, sure, as a child. But I also believed—”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Chien said, “that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time?”

“I’ll fix you a drink,” Tanya said, and padded barefoot into the kitchen.

Chien said, “The Crusher. The Clanker. The Gulper and the Bird and the Climbing Tube—plus other names, forms, I don’t know. I had a hallucination. At the stag dinner. A big one. A terrible one.”

“But the stelazine—”

“It brought on a worse one,” he said.

“Is there any way,” Tanya said somberly, “that we can fight this thing you saw? This apparition you call a hallucination but which very obviously was not?”

He said, “Believe in it.”

“What will that do?”

“Nothing,” he said wearily. “Nothing at all. I’m tired; I don’t want a drink—let’s just go to bed.”

“Okay.” She padded back into the bedroom, began pulling her striped sweater over her head. “We’ll discuss it more thoroughly later.”

“A hallucination,” Chien said, “is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back. I want to be before your peddler got me with that phenothiazine.”

“Just come to bed. It’ll be toasty. All warm and nice.”

He removed his tie, his shirt—and saw, on his right shoulder, the mark, the stigma, which it had left when it stopped him from jumping. Livid marks which looked as if they would never go away. He put his pajama top on then; it hid the marks.

“Anyhow,” Tanya said as he got into the bed beside her, “your career is immeasurably advanced. Aren’t you glad about that?”

“Sure,” he said, nodding sightlessly in the darkness. “Very glad.”

“Come over against me,” Tanya said, putting her arms around him. “And forget everything else. At least for now.”

He tugged her against him then, doing what she asked and what he wanted to do. She was neat; she was swiftly active; she was successful and she did her part. They did not bother to speak until at last she said, “Oh!” And then she relaxed.

“I wish,” he said, “that we could go on forever.”

“We did,” Tanya said. “It’s outside of time; it’s boundless, like an ocean. It’s the way we were in Cambrian times, before we migrated up onto the land; it’s the ancient primary waters. This is the only time we get to go back, when this is done. That’s why it means so much. And in those days we weren’t separate; it was like a big jelly, like those blobs that float up on the beach.”

“Float up,” he said, “and are left there to die.”

“Could you get me a towel?” Tanya asked. “Or a washcloth? I need it.”

He padded into the bathroom for a towel. There—he was naked now—he once more saw his shoulder, saw where it had seized hold of him and held on, dragged him back, possibly to toy with him a little more.

The marks, unaccountably, were bleeding.

He sponged the blood away. More oozed forth at once and, seeing that, he wondered how much time he had left. Probably only hours.

Returning to bed, he said, “Could you continue?”

“Sure. If you have any energy left; it’s up to you.” She lay gazing up at him unwinkingly, barely visible in the dim nocturnal light.

“I have,” he said. And hugged her to him.

In a hydrogen war ravaged society the nubile young women go down to a futuristic zoo and have sexual intercourse with various deformed and non-human life forms in the cages. In this particular account a woman who has been patched together out of the damaged bodies of several women has intercourse with an alien female, there in the cage, and later on the woman, by means of futuristic science, conceives. The infant is born, and she and the female in the cage fight over it to see who gets it. The human young woman wins, and promptly eats the offspring, hair, teeth, toes and all. Just after she has finished she discovers that the offspring is God.

At four-fifteen in the afternoon, T.S.T., Garson Poole woke up in his hospital bed, knew that he lay in a hospital bed in a three-bed ward and realized in addition two things: that he no longer had a right hand and that he felt no pain.

They had given me a strong analgesic, he said to himself as he stared at the far wall with its window showing downtown New York. Webs in which vehicles and peds darted and wheeled glimmered in the late afternoon sun, and the brilliance of the aging light pleased him. It’s not yet out, he thought. And neither am I.

A fone lay on the table beside his bed; he hesitated, then picked it up and dialed for an outside line. A moment later he was faced by Louis Danceman, in charge of Tri-Plan’s activities while he, Garson Poole, was elsewhere.

“Thank God you’re alive,” Danceman said, seeing him; his big, fleshy face with its moon’s surface of pock marks flattened with relief. “I’ve been calling all—”

“I just don’t have a right hand,” Poole said.

“But you’ll be okay. I mean, they can graft another one on.”

“How long have I been here?” Poole said. He wondered where the nurses and doctors had gone to; why weren’t they clucking and fussing about him making a call?

“Four days,” Danceman said. “Everything here at the plant is going splunkishly. In fact we’ve splunked orders from three separate police systems, all here on Terra. Two in Ohio, one in Wyoming. Good solid orders, with one third in advance and the usual three-year lease-option.”

“Come get me out of here,” Poole said.

“I can’t get you out until the new hand—”

“I’ll have it done later.” He wanted desperately to get back to familiar surroundings; memory of the mercantile squib looming grotesquely on the pilot screen careened at the back of his mind; if he shut his eyes he felt himself back in his damaged craft as it plunged from one vehicle to another, piling up enormous damage as it went. The kinetic sensations… he winced, recalling them. I guess I’m lucky, he said to himself.

“Is Sarah Benton there with you?” Danceman asked.

“No.” Of course; his personal secretary—if only for job considerations—would be hovering close by, mothering him in her jejune, infantile way. All heavy-set women like to mother people, he thought. And they’re dangerous; if they fall on you they can kill you. “Maybe that’s what happened to me,” he said aloud. “Maybe Sarah fell on my squib.”

“No, no; a tie rod in the steering fin of your squib split apart during the heavy rush-hour traffic and you—”

“I remember.” He turned in his bed as the door of the ward opened; a white-clad doctor and two blue-clad nurses appeared, making their way toward his bed. “I’ll talk to you later,” Poole said and hung up the fone. He took a deep, expectant breath.

“You shouldn’t be foning quite so soon,” the doctor said as he studied his chart. “Mr. Garson Poole, owner of Tri-Plan Electronics. Maker of random ident darts that track their prey for a circle-radius of a thousand miles, responding to unique enceph wave patterns. You’re a successful man, Mr. Poole. But, Mr. Poole, you’re not a man. You’re an electric ant.”

“Christ,” Poole said, stunned.

“So we can’t really treat you here, now that we’ve found out. We knew, of course, as soon as we examined your injured right hand; we saw the electronic components and then we made torso x-rays and of course they bore out our hypothesis.”

“What,” Poole said, “is an ‘electric ant’?” But he knew; he could decipher the term.

A nurse said, “An organic robot.”

“I see,” Poole said. Frigid perspiration rose to the surface of his skin, across all his body.

“You didn’t know,” the doctor said.

“No.” Poole shook his head.

The doctor said, “We get an electric ant every week or so. Either brought in here from a squib accident—like yourself—or one seeking voluntary admission… one who, like yourself, has never been told, who has functioned alongside humans, believing himself—itself—human. As to your hand—” He paused.

“Forget my hand,” Poole said savagely.

“Be calm.” The doctor leaned over him, peered acutely down into Poole’s face. “We’ll have a hospital boat convey you over to a service facility where repairs, or replacement, on your hand can be made at a reasonable expense, either to yourself, if you’re self-owned, or to your owners, if such there are. In any case you’ll be back at your desk at Tri-Plan functioning just as before.”

“Except,” Poole said, “now I know.” He wondered if Danceman or Sarah or any of the others at the office knew. Had they—or one of them—purchased him? Designed him? A figurehead, he said to himself; that’s all I’ve been. I must never really have run the company; it was a delusion implanted in me when I was made… along with the delusion that I am human and alive.

“Before you leave for the repair facility,” the doctor said, “could you kindly settle your bill at the front desk?”

Poole said acidly, “How can there be a bill if you don’t treat ants here?”

“For our services,” the nurse said. “Up until the point we knew.”

“Bill me,” Poole said, with furious, impotent anger. “Bill my firm.” With massive effort he managed to sit up; his head swimming, he stepped haltingly from the bed and onto the floor. “I’ll be glad to leave here,” he said as he rose to a standing position. “And thank you for your humane attention.”

“Thank you, too, Mr. Poole,” the doctor said. “Or rather I should say just Poole.”

At the repair facility he had his missing hand replaced.

It proved fascinating, the hand; he examined it for a long time before he let the technicians install it. On the surface it appeared organic—in fact on the surface, it was. Natural skin covered natural flesh, and true blood filled the veins and capillaries. But, beneath that, wires and circuits, miniaturized components, gleamed… looking deep into the wrist he saw surge gates, motors, multi-stage valves, all very small. Intricate. And—the hand cost forty frogs. A week’s salary, insofar as he drew it from the company payroll.

“Is this guaranteed?” he asked the technicians as they fused the “bone” section of the hand to the balance of his body.

“Ninety days, parts and labor,” one of the technicians said. “Unless subjected to unusual or intentional abuse.”

“That sounds vaguely suggestive,” Poole said.

The technician, a man—all of them were men—said, regarding him keenly, “You’ve been posing?”

“Unintentionally,” Poole said.