The Star Diaries (11 page)

When I had solemnly sworn to everything, they led me to another room, where I was entered in the register and ordered to submit daily reports at the central halberderie—after which, feeling weak and numb, I was permitted to leave the palace.

Night was falling. I went outside the city, sat on the grass and began to think. I was sick at heart. Had they cut off my head I would at least have saved my honor, but now, by going over to the side of that electronic monster, I’d betrayed the cause I represented, I’d ruined my chances completely. What then, run off to the rocket? A shameful retreat. But all the same I started walking. To be an informer in the employ of a machine that ruled an army of iron crates—that would have been more shameful yet. Who can describe my horror when, instead of the rocket in the place I’d left it, I saw only the scattered remains, broken fragments, clearly the work of robots!

It was dark when I returned to the city. I sat on a stone and for the first time in my life wept bitterly for my home, lost forever, and the tears trickled down the iron interior of that hollow hulk which was to be, for the remainder of my days, my prison—and they trickled out through the knee chinks, threatening to stiffen the joints with rust. But I no longer cared.

Then suddenly I noticed a platoon of halberdiers slowly wending its way towards a meadow at the edge of the city, outlined against the last glimmer of the setting sun. Their behavior was peculiar. In the growing darkness of evening first one, then another separated himself from the ranks and, moving his feet as quietly as possible, crept into the bushes and disappeared. This struck me so odd that, in spite of my extreme depression, I got up quietly and set off after the one nearest me.

This was—I must add—at a time when the local shrubbery was bearing wild berries, similar in taste to whortleberries, sweet and full of flavor. I’d eaten them myself—whenever, that is, I was able to slip away from the iron metropolis. Picture my astonishment upon seeing the halberdier I’d been following pull out a tiny key, the exact duplicate of the one given me by the director of Division Headquarters, and use it to unfasten his visor from the left side, then, grabbing berries with both hands, stuff them into that open pit like a savage! Even from where I stood I could hear the sounds of slurping and gulping.

“Psst,” I hissed urgently. “Hey!”

With a single bound he went crashing into the underbrush, but didn’t get far—or else I would have heard him. He had fallen down somewhere.

“Listen,” I said in a lower voice, “don’t be afraid. I’m a man. A man. Disguised like yourself.”

Something like a single eye, glittering with fear and suspicion, peered out at me from behind a leaf,

“And howe woot I ye wil nat me biwreyen?” came a hoarse voice.

“But I’m trying to tell you. I came from Earth. They sent me specially.”

I had to persuade him a while more before he was reassured enough to crawl out of the bushes. He touched my armor in the darkness.

“Ye are a man? For sooth?”

“Why won’t you talk normally?” I asked.

“Tush, I hav foryeten howe. ’Tis the fifte yeer sithen cruel Destinee hath me delivered hider … muchel hav I suffred, more thanne I conne telle … ywis, Fortune ys mercifyll, to lette me clappe mine ye upon a veray muccilid aforn I dye…” he babbled.

“Pull yourself together! Enough of that! Listen—you’re not by any chance from Intelligence?”

“Certeyn, fro Intelligentz. ’Twas Malingraut did sende me, here for to swinke and swelte moste grevously.”

“But why didn’t you flee?”

“Pray howe am I to flee, an’ my rokket be desmauntelled and eke to-shivered to flindren? Allas and weilaway, hard ys my lot! But ’tis tyme I retourne … shal we see everich other ageyn? Atte barracks, to-morwe … wiltow nat come?”

I agreed to meet him then, without even knowing what he looked like, and we said goodbye; cautioning me to wait there for a while yet, he disappeared into the blackness of the night. It was with a light heart that I reentered the city, for now I saw the chance of organizing a conspiracy. In order to conserve my strength, I stopped at the first inn that presented itself along the way and went to bed. Early next morning, while looking in the mirror, I noticed a chalk mark on my chest, a tiny cross, right below the left pauldron, and suddenly the scales fell from my eyes. That man—he had done this, intending to betray me! “The no-good skunk,” I muttered, frantically trying to think of what to do now. I wiped away the treacherous sign, but that wasn’t enough. He’d already made his report—I was sure of that—and they would start looking for this unknown mucilid, and obviously turn first to their registers, and call the most likely suspects in for questioning—I was there of course, on that list; the thought of being questioned made me shudder. I realized that somehow I had to divert suspicion from myself, and immediately hit upon a plan. All that day I stayed at the inn, abusing a calf in order to remain inconspicuous, but at dusk I quickly set out for the center of town, concealing in the palm of my hand a piece of chalk. With it I inscribed at least four hundred crosses on the iron hides of various passers-by; whoever chanced to come my way received a mark. At about midnight, feeling somewhat easier in my mind, I returned to the tavern, and only then did it occur to me that, besides the traitor with whom I had spoken the night before, there had been other halberdiers creeping into those bushes. This made me stop and think. Then all at once an amazingly simple idea came to me. I left the city and headed for the berries. It was a little after midnight when, once again, that iron rabble appeared, slowly spread out, scattered, and then from the nearby thickets came sounds of heavy breathing, furious chewing, hurried swallowing; afterwards the visors were one by one snapped shut, and the entire company climbed out of the bushes in silence, stuffed to the gills with berries. I approached them—in the darkness they took me for one of their own—and as we marched along chalked little circles on my neighbors, wherever I could. At the gates of the halberderie I did an about-face and went back to the inn.

The following day I sat myself down on a bench outside the barracks and waited for those on furlough to come out. Having spotted in the crowd one of the ones with a circle on the shoulder, I took after him, and when there was no one in the street but us I clapped him on the back with my gauntlet, so that he rang from head to toe, and said:

“In the name of Hys Inductivitee! Com with me!”

So frightened was he, he started clattering all over—and followed me without a word, as docile as a lamb. I closed the door to my room, pulled a screwdriver from my pocket, and began unfastening his head. This took an hour. I lifted it off like an iron pot and was confronted by a face, unpleasantly pallid from being in the dark too long, thin, and walleyed with fear.

“Ye are a mucilid?!” I snarled.

“Yessir, yer worshipe, but—”

“But what?!”

“But I, that ys… I am registred… I swoor aliegiaunce to Hiss Inductivitee!”

“How long ago? Speak!”

“Three … three yeer agoon, sire—but—but wherfor dostow—”

“Hold,” I said. “And do you know of any other mucilids?”

“On Erthe? Yea an soth to sayn I do, yer grace, I crye yow mercy, ’twas oonly—”

“Not on Earth, fool, here!”

“Nay, nossir! Loo! But yif ever I do see ’un, streighte shal I notifye the—”

“All right,” I said. “You may go. Here, put your head back on.”

And tossing him the screws, I pushed him out the door, where I could hear him trying to don his metal skull with trembling hands. Then I sat on my bed, greatly surprised by this turn of events. All that next week there was plenty of work to be done, for I pulled individuals off the street at random, took them to the inn and there unscrewed their heads. My hunch was right: they were all of them men, every last one! Not a single robot in the lot! Gradually an apocalyptic image took shape before my eyes…

A demon, an electrical demon—that Computer! What hell had hatched there in its nest of glowing wires! The planet was wet, humid, rheumatic—and for robots, unhealthy in the highest degree … they must have rusted en masse, and perhaps too there was, as the years passed, an increasing lack of spare parts, and they began to break down, going one by one to that vast cemetery outside of town, where only the wind rang their death knell over sheets of crumbling metal. That was when the Computer, seeing its ranks melt away, seeing its reign endangered, had conceived the most ingenious machination. From its enemies, from the spies dispatched to destroy it, it began to build its own army, its own agents, its own people! Not one of those who were unmasked could betray it—not one of them dared attempt to contact others, other men, having no way of knowing that they weren’t robots, and even if he did find out about this one or that, he’d be afraid that at the first overture the other man would turn him in—just as that first bogus halberdier had tried to do, the one I’d caught off guard in the whortleberry bushes. But the Computer wasn’t satisfied merely to neutralize its enemies—it made of each a champion of its cause, and by requiring them to turn in others, the new arrivals, it gave still further proof of its diabolical cunning, for who could best distinguish men from robots if not those very men, who after all were privy to all the secrets of Intelligence!!

And so each man, unmasked, included in the register and sworn in, felt himself isolated, and possibly even feared his own kind more than the robots, for the robots were not necessarily agents of the secret police, while the men were—to a man. And that was how this electrical monster kept us in slavery, foiling everyone—with everyone else, for it must have been my own companions in misery who had taken apart my rocket, as they had done (judging by the halberdier’s words) with scores of other rockets.

“Infernal, infernal!” I thought, quivering with rage. And it wasn’t enough that it drove us to treachery, that the Division itself sent more and more of us to serve the thing’s pleasure—Earth was also supplying it with the very finest, rustproof, top-quality equipment! Were there any robots left among those ironclad minions? I seriously doubted it. And the zeal with which they persecuted men, that too became clear. For being men themselves, they had to be—as neophytes to magnificanism—more robotlike than the authentic robots. Hence that fanatical hatred displayed by my lawyer. Hence that dastardly attempt to turn me in by the man I had first unmasked. Oh what fiendishness of coils and circuitry was here, what electrical finesse!

Revealing the secret would get me nowhere; at a command from the Computer I would unquestionably be thrown in the dungeon. No, the people had been obedient too long, for too long had they feigned devotion to that plugged-in Beelzebub, why they’d even forgotten how to talk properly!

What then could I do? Sneak into the palace? That would be madness. But what remained? An uncanny situation: here was a city surrounded by cemeteries, in which the Computer’s subjects lay, long since turned to rust, yet
it
reigned on, stronger than ever, and confident, for Earth kept sending it more and more new men—idiotic! The longer I thought about it, the more clearly I saw that even this discovery, which certainly must have been made before me by more than one of us, didn’t change things in the least. A single individual could do nothing; he would have to confide in someone, trust someone, but that inevitably resulted in instant betrayal, the traitor counting on a promotion, on getting into the good graces of the machine. “By Saint Electrix!” I thought, “it is a very genius…” And thinking this, noticed that I too was already affecting a slightly archaic mode of speech, that I too had caught that contagion by which the sight of iron hoods comes to seem natural, and a human face—something naked, ugly, indecent … mucilidinous. “Good Lord, I’m going insane,” I thought, “and the others, they must have turned lunatic years ago—help!”

After a night spent in gloomy meditation, I betook myself to a store downtown, paid thirty pistoons for the sharpest cleaver I could find, waited for the darkness to fall, then stole inside the great garden that surrounded the palace of the Computer. There, hidden in the shrubs, I freed myself of my iron armor with the aid of a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, and on tiptoe, barefoot, without a sound, I shinnied up the rainspout to the second floor. The window was open. Along the corridor, clanking hollowly, a guard was walking back and forth. When he turned his back at the opposite end of the hall, I jumped inside, quickly ran to the closest door and entered quietly—unnoticed.

This happened to be that same large room in which I’d heard the voice of the Computer. It was dark. I pulled aside the black curtain and saw the tremendous roof-high wall of the Computer, with dials shining like eyes. At the edge a white chink was visible. Apparently a door, left ajar. I approached it on tiptoe and held my breath.

The interior of the Computer looked like a small room in a second-class hotel. In the back stood a half-open safe, not very large, a cluster of keys hanging from its lock. At a desk piled high with papers sat an elderly, dried-up gentleman in a gray suit, with baggy sleevelets, the kind worn by office clerks; he was writing, filling out page after page of forms. There was a cup of coffee steaming at his elbow. A few crackers lay in the saucer. I tiptoed in, closed the door behind me. The hinges didn’t squeak. “Ahem,” I said, lifting the cleaver with both hands.

The gentleman started and looked up at me; the gleam of the cleaver in my hands produced in him the utmost consternation. His face twisted, he fell to his knees.

“No!!” he groaned. “No!!!”

“Raise your voice once more, and you perish,” I said. “Who are you?”

“He-heptagonius Argusson, my lord.”

“I’m not your lord. You will address me as Mister Tichy, understand?!”

“Yessir! Yes! Yes!”

“Where is the Computer?”

“Mi-mister…”

“There isn’t any Computer, is there?!”

“No—nossir! I was only following orders!"

“Of course. And from whom, if one might ask?”

He trembled like a leaf. He lifted his hands in entreaty.