Chapter Two
The concept of my memory machine “Mnemo” came to me in a dream that provided a complete vision of the device, its name and its operation. For a long while before, I had postulated a collective genetic memory in mankind, going back to antiquity—one that fired electrochemical impulses along imprinted brain routes, causing people to war repeatedly in the same tragic ways. My theory explained déjà-vu and the instantaneous love or hatred people felt for one another, for old emotions never died. I longed to prove that each human life created an overlay of events in the collective brain, a track over old tracks, and that with each new tracking old incidents slipped further into an individual’s subconscious. Ancient events were just beneath the surface, and I needed to find them. The miracle of my dream revealed how! A subject connected to my mnemonic machine could carry us back in his memory to the earliest twitchings of all life. Inevitably that had to lead to the Creator Himself, if He existed, and to the singularity of explosion whence the universe began.
—Notes of Professor Nathan Pelter,
League Penitentiary System Archives
A short distance inland from St. Charles Beach, a shiny-black truck-trailer with no chrome or markings slithered along the winding road to Santa Quininas Federal Penitentiary. It was shortly past sunrise, and the rig’s tinted windows reflected the day’s first rays of sun. The rig came to a stop outside the main gate, hissed its brakes. A guard in magenta and brown armor stepped from his booth and waved a transmitter baton at the heavy iron alloy gate. The gate swung open toward the interior of the compound, and the truck went through.
Harley Gutan parked the Dispatch Unit in the same spot as always, by the heavy alloy door that led to Death Row. Wondering how many prisoners would be dispatched this time, he activated the electronic clip pad on the seat by him and noted twenty-nine names.
He felt cold pain in an airspace where a severed little finger once had been, before a childhood tricycling accident. Sometimes he moved the missing finger as if it were in an unseen dimension, even touched it with his other hand and felt it. Now he tucked the affected hand between his flank and the seat cushion, to keep the finger warm.
Why did it get so cold?
In the Inner Planet League, prison authorities no longer executed people with gas, electricity, hanging, lethal injections or Damoclean body crushers. Not since Professor Nathan Pelter left his machine to the Inner Planet League when he died. It wasn’t designed as a killing machine, so the story went, but it worked admirably to that purpose, dispatching prisoners on a fantastic journey as they died.
Gutan was a Dispatcher, a euphemistic title selected for public relations purposes.
Pelter had died in his own machine, and rumor held that he went out with a broad smile on his face. An accidental death, some said, but there were other theories extrapolated from rumored personal problems. It was said that his unusual machine could not be opened for servicing or adjustment without destroying it and all of its secrets, and that it couldn’t be ’rayed to see its mysterious inner workings. It was one-of-a-kind, and had to be moved among numerous truck-trailer rigs like the one Gutan was in.
So far, to Gutan’s knowledge, the machine had required no servicing by the prison system. And it had been used extensively in the half century since Pelter’s death, with inmates brought from all over the solar system to facilities accessible by the truck-trailers. There was an order out that the prison system was not to risk flying the machine, based upon statistics proving that these special trucks were the safest means of transport.
None of the criminals that Gutan “dispatched” died with a smile, although some entered the machine that way. A standard tough con’s sneer, usually. Gutan had seen it often. But there was nothing standard in the way they died. Always they screamed before it was over, with death masks twisted into nightmare hideousness.
If Pelter went out with a smile, Gutan thought as the cab door slid open, he must have been one tough son of a bitch. Either that or he hypnotized himself.
“What’s new and exciting, Harl?” a guard of about Gutan’s height asked, coming around the outside of the truck.
Gutan stepped down from the cab and grunted a barely civil and purposefully unintelligible acknowledgment. He touched a button on his Wriskron, locking the truck and setting the vehicular alarm system. With a second press of the button, a light on the time dial flashed pink, indicating the alarms were operational.
The air was cool, with the ground still in shadow and early rays of sunlight glistening from the highest points of the guard towers.
The magenta and brown of the guard’s armor matched the prison-system shirt and trousers Gutan wore. The guard’s armor was thin but sturdy, of a new and arcane alloy that light artillery projectiles could not penetrate, not even those How-How-tipped, exploding microparticle shells. There were matching helmets, but guards refused to wear them because of razzing from prisoners. It was an act of perceived manhood to go around without a helmet, and it struck Gutan that guards and prisoners were to a great extent of one ilk. He didn’t trust any of them.
“Show me the new batch,” Gutan said, staring at the door to Death Row. “My schedule is tight, and I want the dispatches ready when the system goes online at seven AM.”
* * *
St. Charles Beach was a low-lying town just off the old Bluepac Highway that skirted Wessornia’s coast in those days. The town attracted its share of vacationers, mostly in-staters from big cities to the north and south. Its swimming beach was privately owned by one family, the Domingos, and they also owned the general store, the gas pump, and a recreational vehicle campground (Domingo’s Reef) that stretched north of town along the dunes.
“No parking” signs were everywhere, as if the place were a breeding ground for them, and they were posted in eclectic unfriendliness by the Domingos and almost everyone else who owned property. One sign that stuck in McMurtrey’s memory like a bad song depicted a ferocious, red-bearded cartoon character holding a hog-leg handgun. The caption: DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE.
It cost twenty javits to get into the swimming beach, seventy-five javits a night for the RV facility, and a visitor couldn’t even leave a car in the store parking lot to take a half hour walk. Tow trucks lurked in alleyways and shadows like hulking muggers, waiting for opportunities. One Domingo son-in-law held the towing concession. He was also the sheriff, a one-man town council, and the local judge, so towing abuses couldn’t be appealed.
“A cutthroat town,” McMurtrey called it. But he had grown accustomed to the place, even liked it now during the winter off-season. Winters on the Wessornian coast hadn’t been cold since earlier in the century when three of the continent’s biggest volcanoes went off. The locals got their town back to a great extent at this time of the year … except for the parking situation, which irked most everyone at one time or another. At least the locals didn’t have to deal with surly, chiseling old Mr. Domingo for supplies, because Faberville was only a couple of miles inland. Prices were better there, and there weren’t any “no parking” signs.
As McMurtrey looked out of his living room window, he saw the multicolored pomegranate-shaped flying ships assembled in a long, straight line from the northernmost tip of Domingo’s Reef right through the center of town, across building tops, in iceplant-covered yards, and in streets. Throngs of people milled around the ships, waiting to see what would happen next.
They looked like movie extras at an employment hall, so diverse was their raiment. Most were men, some in traditional white or pastel robes, with the long beards and sandals or shaven heads of ascetics. Others resembled ferocious warriors, with sharply cut beards and weapons that hung at angles from their hips—swords, pulverizers, guns, knives and stunbows. Still other men resembled royalty, with gold-trimmed, jewel-encrusted robes, long coats, and tiers of jewelry. There were numerous turbans, in a panoply of folds and colors.
The women were nearly as impressive in range, including nuns in plain white or black cotton habits alongside weapon-toting musclefems in flak-resistant jumpsuits. There were even those who could easily have passed for princesses or queens, bedecked as they were in exquisite long gowns with high, swirled coiffures. Some women came to town in elegant landaus, drawn by robotic horses, while others had come long distances on foot.
Life insurance robots worked in the midst of all this, selling flight insurance to people who thought they were going on the journey.
Thus far no one had been able to open a ship’s hatch, and despite entreaties from some that he try, McMurtrey hadn’t done so. He had a feeling that he could get into any one of them if he wanted to, and that others … only certain people with certain ships, the ones they … It wasn’t clear.
McMurtrey occupied a special position, and realized for the first time as he gazed out on the town that he was one of the few that God had ever selected to deliver messages to mankind.
I am a messenger of God, he thought. A prophet?
Several of the ships were white, and one that stood nearest to his bungalow held his attention most often. Sometimes he caught himself staring into its whiteness hypnotically, and when this happened he couldn’t recall how long he had been so engrossed. He felt curiously soothed when he finished looking at it, and coming to consciousness was not unlike awakening from a good sleep.
McMurtrey assumed that these were ships, despite their rather unaerodynamic, pudgy shapes. Each vessel had a nubby pointed tip at the top, exhaustlike vents at the bottom, an exterior hatch, and flight-deck-type windshields way up near the top. The ships were too high for a person on a lift truck or ladder truck to see inside the windshields, and thus far McMurtrey had only seen Bureau of Loyalty guncopters and hoverplanes near the ships at that height. The Bureau knew something, and it disturbed McMurtrey that he hadn’t heard anything directly from them.
How did the fleet of ships get to St. Charles Beach, and were they really going to transport people to God? A number of people theorized they were full of aliens or Outer Planet warriors, prepared to leap out and carry humans off into subjugation. Some felt the ships ran automatically, with computer-controlled drive systems or robopilots. Others subscribed to none of this: The ships had no controls, no crews, no robots, and were there simply because God willed it so. The last theory seemed easiest for McMurtrey to accept, although paradoxically it was the most illogical and difficult to explain.
Not even Old Man Jacoby, a stargazer and the most nocturnal person in town, had seen or heard the ships arrive. They were just there for everyone to see and marvel at when the sun came up one day. Reportedly, Jacoby only shrugged his shoulders when asked how it could have happened.
Old men doze off, McMurtrey thought. Or their minds wander. He must have missed something.… What an understatement!
McMurtrey recalled a game he and a friend used to play as children in Ciscola, when they walked over cars instead of around them, denting car tops in the process. They were thoughtless acts, recalled to mind by these ships, the way they had set down wherever they pleased—atop buildings, yards, vehicles, spanning streets. But the ships had platforms that prevented damage to anything. Even Domingo’s Video Palace with its high marquee was straddled without damage. This suggested a degree of courtesy as well as flexibility, and phenomenally rapid construction technology.
Look at all the parking violators, McMurtrey thought, scratching the back of his head. And not a tow truck in sight. It amused him to think of the insidious Domingos and their vulture trucks, with no way of hauling off spaceships. No doubt the Domingos were in touch with their lawyers, ready to ticket God if they dared.
McMurtrey’s pulse quickened.
He gazed upon the throngs of people and life insurance robots knotted around each ship, and a sensation rushed through his brain. He closed his eyes momentarily, and when he reopened them he squinted and was able to distinguish the pious from the onlookers and hangers-on, for he detected a slight, barely discernible pale yellow aura around some, those he sensed were the pious. A sensation of Great Wordless Truth enveloped him, and he barely got an angle on it. He tried to concentrate, felt the concept slipping away.
He knew those with auras were the pious, the ones who truly belonged here. Some of them wore white, black, saffron or other raiment of various religious orders, and others wore common everyday clothing, as anyone on any street might wear. These pious comprised only a small proportion of those present, but in the distance, on the road winding down the rocky hillside to town, he saw more approaching on foot—the followers of many religions. Their bodies glowed slightly, a pale yellow, and McMurtrey felt like a man wearing infraglasses, seeing things that others could not or should not see.
Three deer watched from a safe distance on a hillside, then scurried up the hill and disappeared into a cluster of sycamore trees.
The dunes and flatlands around Domingo’s Reef were covered with tents, and locals were beginning to call that area “Tent City.” Only a few recreational vehicles were visible.
McMurtrey knew he would have to face the multitude sooner or later, explaining God’s message to the extent that he could. One answer was awakening in his mind as he stood looking out on the town, and he was beginning to feel that he could explain why everything was here, in St. Charles Beach.
It’s because I’m here, he thought. The white ship—something special about it for me. Why?
Tremendous energy had been channeled through his mind in recent days, from the aura people. Strangely, despite knowing this viscerally, he felt no fatigue. Adrenalin pumped through his veins, kept him charged. But he felt rising trepidation, an onrushing fear that people would laugh at him.
He had been going around in public with a chicken on his shoulder for years, letting people think him odd, letting them talk as they wished about him. None of it bothered him before, because it had all been a great big private joke. He didn’t think he cared what anyone thought. Now it seemed to matter, and he wished he hadn’t appeared on televid with No Name.
He should go before the public now and make them take him seriously. It had to be that way, almost by definition, for he was carrying a momentous holy message.
He had asked God about that, if religion was supposed to be serious, and the response hadn’t really answered the question. God asked if religion was really the way to reach Him, and He phrased it rhetorically, as if it wasn’t the way.
God had chosen him, dammit! People wouldn’t dare laugh at him, not with the evidence of God’s power all around, not with the auras, even if only McMurtrey could see them. These were good people, and … but some carried weapons.
It was another problem of definition. Religious people had auras, or at least it was said the holiest did, the saints and prophets. The aura concept seemed almost hackneyed to McMurtrey, too pat, and this was troublesome. Didn’t people only see auras in imagination, in strange visions?
With so many theological representatives appearing at his doorstep, McMurtrey feared some were there to show him up, to prove him an infamous fraud. He might go out and bluff his way through for a while, taking full credit for the fleet and asserting that this miracle was an affirmation of the Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood. But this façade wouldn’t last long if God intervened.
On the other hand, maybe God would want him to have fun with it for a while. What was the Leader of the Universe really like?
McMurtrey agonized over this for a long time, focusing his energies inwardly so intensely that his vision fogged over. Presently he shook his head, and again gazed upon the town.
Best to be humble, he decided. I’ll go out with No Name and admit everything.
* * *
The man slipped into the seclusion of a thick oak grove, and upon the ground he placed a sheet of white plazymer, which he stepped upon. With two fingers he rubbed the back of one hand until it was hot and a blister formed there.
From the forefinger of the other hand, a slender blade of blue bone pierced the fingertip bloodlessly, forming a cutting tool. With that blade he sliced around the sides of the blister, releasing an ooze of water and leaving it attached to the back of his hand with only a flap of epidermis. The blue bone blade receded into the fingertip, disappeared from view.
He lifted the flap of skin, and at a thought-impulse, a lance of red light emerged from one eye, passing through the epidermal flap and touching one of his black leather shoes. The shoe shriveled into a tiny dark flake which dropped on the plazymer. Then the thin white sock on that foot shriveled and fell as a white flake. This exposed the bare skin of the foot, and the skin was not affected by the light.
Quickly he repeated this procedure with the other shoe and sock, resulting in four flakes on the plazymer sheet. His coat, shirt, trousers and underclothes followed in like manner, and in short order he stood entirely in the buff, with a number of tiny flakes beneath him on the plazymer.
Then he remembered his cap, removed it and reduced it, relegating it to the micro-collection.
From his other eye a lance of violet light emerged, melding with the red light as both passed through the epidermal flap. They formed a spectrum of color on the other side of the flap, and a spectral light-bath covered the plazymer and the tiny flakes upon it
He stepped from the plazymer onto moist soil, and as he did so the edges of the plazymer shrank and wrapped around the flakes, enclosing them in a neat little white packet.
The packet, no more than a quarter the width of his smallest fingernail and only a little bit thicker, rose on the spectral beam. He focused the beam on his now-exposed bellybutton at the center of a round and protruding belly, and the packet tucked itself neatly into the orifice, disappearing from view.
Loyalty to the Bureau, he thought. The Bureau of Loyalty.
With the fingers of one hand, he smoothed the epidermal flap back onto the back of the other hand and sealed the bloodless wound, leaving no visible evidence of incision.
Cool, smooth currents of electricity traversed the superconductors of his artificial brain. He was pleased with this assignment, for he had been programmed to feel this way.
The happiest government employees were not human.
Jin understood full well that he wasn’t human, but felt no remorse at this. His cyberoo parts didn’t wear out easily, and theoretically he could go on forever with only minimal self-maintenance. He had been programmed to troubleshoot his own parts, a nearly failsafe method that encompassed backups on top of backups. Every part in his body and every power system had twelvefold redundancy.
This C-Unit 7891 was nearly invincible. Anyone attempting to destroy it would have to accomplish annihilation in one quick, efficient act. Short of that, one of the biogenerating redundancies would remain functional, from which Jin could reconstruct himself in a matter of seconds, using the raw material of his body and nearby materials of virtually any kind.
His last backup system represented self-preservation, a priority in this series exceeded only by Jin’s obligations to the Bureau.
Anyone attempting to destroy Jin had another obstacle to overcome, which Jin displayed now as part of his testing procedure. He touched his nose, and in a nanosecond little gunports opened around his body, revealing a panoply of mini-cannons. Some were on his face, with one on each cheek, one on his forehead and one in the center of his chin. Even his sexual organ had been converted to a baby howitzer.
He tested his guns, using silencers and blank cartridges. None misfired.
Now where did I put that damned broom? he thought.
His eyes continued to project beams of red and violet, but in parallel.
With an unadulterated fingernail, he dug into his bellybutton, pulling out the white packet and dozens of others, in varying colors. He settled on a brown one, replaced the other packets. The beams of eye-light remerged, and he narrowed the spectral force, passing the tip of it over the packet. The packet unfolded in his hands, revealing a pile of light and dark flakes.
He heard and then felt a slight wind, sheltered the flakes to prevent scattering.
He nudged them around with a forefinger, found the one he wanted, which was distinguishable to his field of vision by its shape and hue.
The red light receded into one eye, leaving only violet, which touched only the selected flake. On the end of the light beam, he lifted the flake and watched it enlarge, into a rough straw broom on a long bamboo handle.
Momentarily he held the broom in midair on the beam, then let the broom thump to the ground.
Presently the brown packet had been replaced in his body cavity, and he was ready for the assignment. Now he was Jin the Plarnjarn, a holy man of uncommon excellence.
Stark naked and brushing the ground before each step, Jin emerged from the oak grove and merged slowly with the crowd approaching St. Charles Beach.
Don’t step on the tiniest insect, he thought. Not while anyone’s looking.
* * *
The forty-foot van trailer behind the truck was a fully contained execution and cryogenic body-freezing facility—automated, but not to the extent it might have been. Gutan had no say in how it was set up, but nevertheless it seemed just right to him. He savored personal involvement, enjoyed hitting toggles, pushing buttons, sliding electronic switches.
It was mid-afternoon, and he’d labored nonstop since arriving early that morning. Only one more inmate to go, a woman whose corpse he had been looking forward to. He felt little fatigue, despite having traveled straight through from Oenix, where he had dispatched eighty-seven in two days.
Holding a lit opium pipe, he stood by the pentahedral-shaped mnemonic memory machine, watching while a robotic helper removed the last Death Row inmate from the onboard holding cell.
The pipe, which held black chunks of opium in an oval bowl, had a built-in rechargeable electric coil inside double walls of the bowl. This heated the opium and made it smokable. The smoke was black and acrid.
Mnemo was on, glowing yellow in neutral mode, and it emitted a faint, characteristic whine. The sound, unlike any Gutan had ever heard elsewhere, always brought to mind images of spinning orange and lilac Mobius strips. Today as always they were strips of every conceivable Mobius shape, from those approaching standard geometrical configurations to others that Gutan couldn’t categorize. Simultaneously they all stretched into perfectly round cylinders, and then spun away into a white void. They were seen to him internally with the sound of the machine, and he saw them whether his eyes were closed or open, through a separate viewing channel. Nothing in Gutan’s training instructed him about this sensory phenomenon, but from his understanding of the machine he assumed that the whirl into whiteness carried the memory of anyone inside the machine to incredible reaches of the past. Mnemo had a screen that projected the mental images of subjects, but Gutan had never seen the spinning Mobius colors on that screen.
With the sound off, he couldn’t bring even the simplest shapes forth in memory, though he had vague images of fields of shapes, and though he made the attempt innumerable times. This frightened him, for he had been taught that Mnemo carried its subject back through alternate paths of memory, and always they died in the machine. It seemed to him that his own alternate memory paths were being touched by the sound and perhaps by more, essentially priming him without carrying him back.
He was afraid to ask about this, for someone might think him particularly susceptible and decide that he would be a good subject for experimentation. This wasn’t simply a killing machine after all; it hadn’t been designed for that. And there were intriguing clues Gutan had seen, suggesting that he and the machine were engaged in a clandestine scientific experiment.
Curiously he had developed a longing to travel those mysterious paths, to enter the machine himself and EXPERIENCE. It was perhaps a death wish or entropy, or alternately a longing for another plane of existence where he might live in a different, unfamiliar form. Gutan didn’t fear death, but he didn’t want to lose the perks of his life: opium and fresh cadavers.
Things could be done with fresh cadavers.
Sometimes he estimated survival odds. Every person known to have entered the machine had died within it. But Gutan’s chance, it seemed to him, lay in the stories concerning Professor Pelter, that the professor didn’t have killing in mind when he designed the thing. Purportedly it was for a different, more important purpose, and the promise of discovering that purpose sometimes bolstered Gutan’s courage. Maybe with just the right settings …
The thought of a “more important purpose amused” Gutan. How deliciously ironic it would be if he of all people discovered something significant, something really significant.
The robotic helper was a PYA1200, with exponential strength. It could lift a medium-sized building if called upon to do so, and had the added feature of storage compactability. Now through black wisps of opium smoke Gutan saw it as a rolling Erector-set-man more than two meters high, that in an instant, at an operator’s command, could compress itself into a neat little box no larger than a toaster oven. Gutan called it “Fork” because of the stiff-armed forkliftlike manner in which it loaded and unloaded dispatchees from Mnemo.
Fork had pincers on the ends of his arms, which he was using to hold a huge naked woman. The van floor flexed as Fork rolled toward Gutan, passing the cryogenic bodychambers that were on one side.
The robot was like a good hunting dog with a prize for its master, but before the kill. The designers of Fork hadn’t bothered with much of a face—just a few rivets where features belonged, on a paper-thin alloy surface. Most modern robots had faces, apparently by popular demand, and even this unit had one, despite the premium of utility and compactness. Fork’s tightly riveted expression was entirely neutral—two parallel straight lines for the mouth, two rectangles for eyes, a circle for the nose. But now, in a drug-induced hallucination, Gutan thought he detected the glimmerings of a smile around the edges of the rivets comprising the mouth.
The woman in Fork’s grasp rivaled small planet mass, and in her naked, prone position her great pendulous breasts hung halfway to the floor. She didn’t struggle, although five of the twenty-eight already dispatched this day had struggled ferociously and paid for it. Fork wasn’t programmed to show patience or compassion, so he gave them pincer shots to the kidneys.
According to the death docket on the electronic clip pad, this woman was a “war criminal,” which probably meant she was a dissident involved in the peace movement, sentenced to death by the Bureau of Loyalty. A keloid scar spanned her face, and by her calm expression Gutan guessed she was either playing possum or in acceptance of her fate.
Gutan wished he were on commission, or better yet that he owned all this equipment. Just think what he could earn with a cushy government dispatch contract!
He tugged at the pipe, felt soothing smoke permeate his body.
In the reflection of a mirrored partition to his left he saw himself. A short man nearing sixty, he had curly black hair, black eyes, and a close-cropped beard flecked with gray. He had a rather simian appearance, with a protruding forehead and high cheekbones. His head had a forward thrust to it, and as he stood by the memory machine he leaned forward involuntarily, his posture having long before been sacrificed through inattention. The stoop made him appear shorter than he actually was, but none of the cadavers he made love to ever complained. His arms and hands were long and apelike, with slender graceful fingers that dangled below his knees. His mother used to say he might have been a pianist with those fingers, if he hadn’t lost one in the tricycling accident.
Mnemo was regularly moved between truck-trailer rigs, and the rigs needed maintenance—so someone undoubtedly had a ripe government contract there for the picking. At appointed stops, workers in lime-green rubber coveralls moved Mnemo between truck transporters with strange looking extruders. At these stops, Dispatchers and rigs changed.
There were four Dispatchers including Gutan, and the general routine was one month on duty and two months off, with allowances for sick pay. Most of the time Gutan ended up flying home to Ciscola from all over the country, then flying to meet the mnemonic machine wherever it ended up two months later.
Gutan’s first work experience had been as an embalming technician in his father’s mortuary. After Gutan spent fifteen years there, a scandal over gold and silver fillings that were missing from cadavers forced the firm into bankruptcy. There were also rumors of corneas and other body parts sold illegally to hospitals, but all of it, while true, went unproven by authorities.
A long period of blacklisting and destitution ensued, in which Gutan bounced between a variety of minimum-wage jobs. Finally he landed a worthwhile position with the government in the Body Disposal Corps. Through a series of staff and management shakeups this led him to the Dispatch Division of the League Penitentiary System.
Initially Gutan worked with what the prison system called “Damoclean boxes,” giant one-to-a-prisoner cages, with a ten-ton weight suspended from the ceiling of each cage. Through remarkable gearing and engineering, the weight was held by but a single cutaway strand of the prisoner’s own hair. It remained but for the Dispatcher to slice the hair, a simple task. When the Mnemo position became available, Gutan took a skills test and was selected as one of the elite crew to operate the machine.
For this assignment Gutan was trained differently, through a job computer chip implanted in his brain. As a consequence, Gutan wondered why any testing had been necessary; unless the job chip worked from a platform of skills already present in the individual.
The opium permitted Gutan to look at himself objectively, as from afar, and in one facet of this he could study the implanted chip as if he were an outside observer, without having to remove it and subject it to electronic analysis. He perused it occasionally for diversion, and found within the chip some of the documentation left by the professor.
Anytime Gutan wanted to do so, he could call internally upon all the data in the chip for review. It was a conscious subconscious experience, since with the extent and method of training he didn’t need to think about his tasks. He wondered if he was learning unauthorized information in this process.
The laboratory-type control methods utilized in the executions, for example, became very apparent upon analysis—the way each condemned prisoner was dispatched with different machine settings, with data fed constantly into an adjacent and sealed government-installed computer.
Gutan watched Fork place the big woman in the mnemonic machine and strap her into the seat.
Working with uncharacteristic slowness, Fork unhooked a spray unit from a bracket on an inside wall, pointed the unit at the woman and pulled a long trigger. Clear electropulmonary gel inundated her naked body, covering even her mouth and nose. The stuff gave her body a sweaty sheen and blocked her breathing, causing her face to turn red for several seconds. It made her eyes red as well, and as Gutan had been taught, temporarily distorted vision without permanent harm. As if it mattered.
A strawberry odor from the gel filled his nostrils, excited him. He used the substance left on bodies as a sexual lubricant.
Fork clamped a strand of red plazymer tubing from the machine to a gel-covered spot on her neck, and she resumed breathing. Her coloration returned to near normal, but she couldn’t conceal agitation, manifested in little muscular twitches all over her body.
After a few seconds, convex bubbles formed in front of her eyes, giving her face an alien cast. These bubbles were as clear as those of eyeglass lenses, enabling the dispatchee and the Dispatcher to look at one another.
Fear had set into her eyes, and this intrigued Gutan. He always enjoyed watching the eyes.
Soon the woman would scream and her face would become horribly distorted, like all the other dispatchees. Then she would be Gutan’s for a time, to have his way with her.
Someone was assimilating data from Mnemo, correlating the different settings with variations in the dispatchees’ vital signs and in the times of death. The subjects were being wrenched back in their memories to prior lives, according to Gutan’s implanted job chip. He had seen incredible images flash across the LCD screen, scenes resembling those in history books, with images that focused only briefly and sometimes not at all, then blurred and provided glimpses of still earlier times, in various societies. As the images spun into antiquity, they were like a film on uncontrolled rewind, skipping onto prior films, separate films. It shouldn’t have been possible.
At times with the mnemonic equipment Gutan thought he might be close to observing the whole history of mankind—in a mind-boggling amalgam one life might become every life, focusing ultimately in the distant, nearly erased past to explain the reason for everything.
Had Professor Pelter discovered what he had been looking for, the culmination of all his efforts? Did each inmate at death discover this priceless information, whatever it was? And if so, was that data transferable to living persons? It seemed obvious to Gutan that the government didn’t have all the answers, that dispatchings were conducted with Mnemo to learn more.
Professor Pelter went out with a head full of secrets.
Gutan didn’t know how many variables there were in machine settings, and this had to be factored in with the variables in human subjects. The possibilities had to be calculator-boggling. With just the right settings and just the right subject, maybe the memory trail, as it rocketed back, wouldn’t kill the subject.
He suspected with this thought that the monitors couldn’t control the speed of memory recapture, that the subjects needed more time to adjust to each setting before going back, before traversing lives. They were being overwhelmed.
Was one life every life?
Gutan had to laugh at these thoughts. An opium-saturated ex-mortician thinking about philosophy, about the meaning of life? If not for a couple of turns of fate, he might still be working in his family’s funeral parlor, just as so many Gutans had done for more than two centuries.
It seemed like only a short while ago that he had worked with his family, but it had been nearly three decades. What had happened to his life? When the family business slipped beneath the waves he felt a shock to his system, a shock to the chain of his bloodline, and in all the time since then he had not recovered.
He felt guilt for something he’d never discussed with his family or with those few friends he’d had over the years, friends who inevitably came no closer to him than acquaintances. Barriers. He always kept them up. Barriers protected him from discovery.
It was this terrible personal truth that kept him from wanting to see anyone in his family. He had a sister, two brothers, nephews and cousins somewhere, but would never see any of them again. Maybe they didn’t want to see him, anyway. Maybe they knew what went on in the shadows.
The opium helped Gutan deal with this, and thus far he hadn’t experienced the usual sleepiness or other adverse side effects. It wasn’t ordinary somniferous opium, according to the mail-order literature that came with it. Gutan had noticed a need for ever-increasing doses, however, in order to achieve the desired state of euphoria.
When Gutan was off duty he thought about being on duty, couldn’t wait to get back to work. Despite his shame, this work intrigued him, and he wanted to learn more about Mnemo than the iceberg tip he had seen so far.
He harbored no doubts that this project was big, far greater than a traveling execution machine. He sensed glimmerings of that truth and of a greater one beyond, like the glimmerings of the smile he thought he saw at times on Fork’s sheet-metal face.
* * *
McMurtrey hadn’t considered for an instant the possibility that he might freeze in front of a crowd. Never before had he spoken to large gatherings, but it occurred to him that a crowd might be easier to handle in one sense than an individual. With individuals he had this chronic, nagging tendency to be distracted by mannerisms. With a crowd, he assured himself, he wouldn’t focus on any individual. It would be a sea of sameness, and his thoughts would remain in line.
So with his chicken on his shoulder that sunny afternoon, McMurtrey went to the podium on the makeshift stage and faced the multitude.
They stood shoulder to shoulder and belly to backside as far as he could see—on the beaches, on the roads, on the rocky hillsides. Big black speakers had been placed everywhere so that all might hear.
The ocean was a cool pale blue, lapping relentlessly in shimmering wave armies at the shoreline, wearing the land away little by little, imperceptibly. McMurtrey, as he stood there listening to the waves and watching them, thought he heard the subtle raspings of shoreline erosion, and in his mind’s eye he tried to envision the great storms of history at this place—as if all were occurring at once in a tremendous blast of water, wind, and sound.
Then the storms subsided and the people grew quiet, with the exception of a stooped woman in the front who waggled her fingers in the chicken beak ritual and sang out loudly:
“O Chubby Mother,
Let me rubba your belly …
Let me rubba your belly.”
One of my followers, McMurtrey thought. God, she’s one of the stupid zealots!
McMurtrey touched his lips, asking for quiet.
He stood in afternoon sunlight telling the people he was a fraud. He told them everything, and it gushed forth in a torrent of phrases he hadn’t known he would use.
The woman in the front moaned that she didn’t believe it, and other solitary cries rang from the throng. It saddened McMurtrey that his words were like knives in the hearts of some, but he knew this had to be done, that ultimately it would be for the best.
When he had said everything, it seemed natural, comfortable, a confessional. He had purged his conscience, bared his tainted soul before all. He stood naked before them.
He saw tears in the audience among those of all denominations, most evidently among the pious, whom he could see glowing softly yellow when he squinted. Nowhere, not even among those who bore swords and other weapons on their hips, did he detect even the flickering of a sneer or any sort of unkind expression. This despite the fact that he stood before them with a fat chicken on his shoulder.
It should have been a mockery; they should have been hurling vegetables and fruit at him.
As they waited for him to speak further, he looked beyond the people on the highest hillside, to the sky. A small cloud was chasing a puffy fat one, and they traveled on a high wind. He heard the wind beyond the sea noise, beyond the whisperings of the crowd.
He looked back at them, and raised his voice to be heard above all the sounds crashing in his ears. His words boomed through the speakers:
“I’ve told you of my life, that I’ve wasted years, that I’ve been a charlatan, a liar. Now, like the boy who cried wolf, I’m asking you to believe me when I tell you that God has spoken to me.”
“Verily, it is so!” came a shout from the crowd. It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant.
“We believe you!” a teenage girl exclaimed. “Praise the Lord! Our ships have come!” She had a shiny, bronze-colored stunbow strapped to her back.
“Is anything too difficult for the Lord?’” a man called out, from just in front of the podium. He held an open Babul, and an electronic concordance pendant dangling from his neck flashed the scriptural reference in orange: NESI 18:14.
A bearded man in a black caftan stepped forward, holding his Kooraq high. It was a brown leather tome, with elegant, flowing script inscribed on the cover. The man’s lips barely moved, and a voice seemed to come not from him, but rather, as in the case of a ventriloquist, from the volume itself: “WE BELIEVE IN ALLAH, AND IN THAT WHICH HAS BEEN SENT DOWN ON US.… TO HIM WE SURRENDER!”
Then a Floriental man in a Wessornian business suit stepped forth with a long rolled scroll, identified himself as an Ota, and said, in a very high, clear voice: “THE WISE MAN NEVER STRIVES HIMSELF FOR THE GREAT, AND THEREBY THE GREAT IS ACHIEVED!’ WE DIDN’T CALL FOR THE SHIPS! WE DID NOT BUILD THEM! HAD WE SOUGHT THESE SHIPS, WE COULD NOT ENTER THEM, FOR THEY WOULD NOT EXIST.”
“I think he’s saying it’s okay to go,” a woman said, within earshot of McMurtrey. “Who cares what he says?” a man said. A few in the crowd chuckled, a rolling, gentle sound. Then other holy men and women stepped forward and spoke, with each giving reasons from their sacred scriptures why people should travel by ship to God’s domain far across the universe. No one spoke against the ships, not even a number of atheists who made their presence known. All agreed that it would be a great adventure, and that someone should embark upon it, although all present did not want to make the journey.
Generally, McMurtrey was impressed with the respect that each religion displayed for others. There were a few rude individuals in the gathering, but their choppy words of criticism toward other faiths fell as stones into a pit—unanswered—and these outcasts fell silent.
After waiting more patiently than he might have, McMurtrey wanted to continue his address. He asked the various representatives to yield to him.
They did so graciously, and McMurtrey spoke for a while longer.
Then he paused, and a current of assent swept all around, building to a crescendo of chanting: “PRAISE GOD AND McMURTREY! PRAISE GOD AND McMURTREY!”
McMurtrey saw the faces of many in the audience uplifted toward him, as if people were beholding divine light. To them, his words were God’s words.
McMurtrey spread his arms wide, gazed reverently at the sky.
But a solitary male voice rose from the multitude, to McMurtrey’s right. It cut through sanctified air like a razor on flesh, making McMurtrey shiver. But he was not cold. “Why you, Rooster?” the voice asked. “Why in the name of all that’s holy did God select you as His messenger?” As the man spoke, he pushed his way through the crowd. People let him past, and soon he stood on the bottom step of the stage, staring up defiantly at McMurtrey. “He has a gun!” someone shouted.
McMurtrey saw it even as he heard the warning, but he didn’t flinch.
An elephant pistol was holstered on the man’s hip, but he wasn’t making a move for the weapon. He wore a green sport coat and was tall, with thinning brown hair combed straight back through untamable cowlicks. The eyes were the pale blue of the sea, looking through people, looking through this fraud, Evander McMurtrey.
McMurtrey was glad he hadn’t lied, for men such as this would have seen the truth and exposed him, McMurtrey’s knees quivered, threatening to fold on him and send him crashing to the floor of the stage.
He noticed that this man had a lot of nervous tics, the sort that invariably had distracted McMurtrey in the past, flooding his brain with images that blocked the thought patterns required for conversation. One of the man’s eyelids twitched occasionally, he tapped one foot on the step importunately, and his trigger finger, like an insect leg, rubbed the adjacent thumb.
Inexplicably, McMurtrey didn’t feel his thoughts muddling. He felt strong, at the crest of a momentous event. This was a purposeful strength, and it seemed capable of carrying him a long way.
McMurtrey took a deep breath and met the man’s gaze. “Your name?” McMurtrey asked.
“Johnny Orbust. I’m a Reborn Krassee, here to debate the Lord’s word and way with you, Rooster.”
“I always like to know who I’m talking to,” McMurtrey said. He squinted, detected no aura around the man. Then as he looked out upon the crowd in this fashion, McMurtrey no longer saw any auras, not even around individuals he had seen glowing before.
“Sun bothering you?” Orbust queried.
“No … it’s … You want to know why the Lord didn’t select a great leader for this task? Why not a person of grand stature, a person capable of engendering the admiration of millions? Why a man who goes around with a chicken on his shoulder?”
Orbust smiled sardonically.
“I’m not here to sell myself to anyone,” McMurtrey said, smoothing the green plumage on No Name’s backside. “Far from it. I’ve denigrated myself before you, exposed my life for the utter farce that it’s been. But the fact remains that God did speak to me and He did produce these marvelous ships. He communicated with many of you as well, or you wouldn’t be here. Perhaps not as He spoke to me, revealing His location, but differently. I sense the truth of this. As I look upon your face, Orbust, and upon the countenances of so many here, I know this is fact.”
Orbust’s jaw dropped. He took a step back, off the staircase and onto the ground. He bent over and lifted a pant leg, revealing a small sheath strapped to his calf.
A weapon, McMurtrey thought, preparing to duck behind the lectern. Why not the cannon on his hip? McMurtrey didn’t see anyone moving toward Orbust to stop him, felt alone and abandoned.
Orbust seemed to have a second thought and paused. He let his pant leg down without pulling forth whatever the sheath held, and straightened.
“What did God say to you?” McMurtrey asked, staring so intensely at Orbust that he forced the man to look away. “It wasn’t … words.…” Orbust said. “I felt … compelled to come here.”
“You came here concerning a ship? A particular ship that will carry you to Heaven?”
Orbust looked at the ground, like a child being reprimanded. “Y-yes. I saw it on televid.” He pointed. “That white one!”
It was the same ship McMurtrey had selected for himself, likewise for no reason he could form into words.
“Others are here to board that ship as well,” McMurtrey said. “It will hold many passengers. When God’s location was announced and we had no way to go there, many of us formed visions of how we would voyage to God. These ships are from our imaginations, from transmitted thought waves. I didn’t fully realize it myself until scant seconds ago, as I gazed out upon you and absorbed your energies. It wasn’t the first time I had known these energies, and they were familiar to me.” The crowd grew exceedingly quiet. McMurtrey felt an adrenalin surge, and the ensuing words came with a rush: “In days past, your thoughts and mine were channeled through me with such force that they materialized into objects. These ships are not mirages. While I sense what has happened, I don’t fully understand how. But it is something I cannot question, and I sense many of you believe this with me.”
By the hush in the crowd and the trusting, childlike faces that stared at him, McMurtrey saw he had struck a responsive chord. They were hanging on his every word.
“THESE ARE OUR CREATIONS!” McMurtrey shouted. “ENTER THEM!”
Orbust’s impertinent question didn’t require an answer. Not in words. Ironically, God had selected the lowliest prophet in the history of mankind for the most important assignment, a pilgrimage to the Master of Masters.
* * *
Gutan took a puff on his opium pipe, watched the subject. She had her eyes closed, awaiting the inevitable that would be brought on when Gutan made the prescribed machine settings and adjustments.
He heard Fork rolling back, the harsh whirrings and squeakings Gutan didn’t always notice.
If this was an elaborate, veiled experiment, it now occurred to Gutan that it had to go beyond the data pouring into the computer system. And theft protection had to be more extensive than the satellite tracking system that his implanted chip said watched the truck-trailer rigs at all times. There had to be eyes everywhere inside, something or someone watching Mnemo at all times. Might it be Fork? Or Gutan himself, transmitting via the chip to headquarters, made complacent by the opium that had appeared too conveniently in his life?
Could Gutan destroy the memory machine if he decided he wanted to? Or did the job chip contain within it a governor that prevented such acts? If the opium was part of the conspiracy, part of the veil, how could he have the thoughts he was experiencing now?
He didn’t want to destroy the machine, couldn’t envision doing anything like that.
He studied his pipe, the graceful curvatures of the dark wood stem that circulated the narcotic through his body. A special variety of opium, part of the conspiracy?
He wanted to dash the pipe to the floor and stomp the addiction mechanism to pieces. Then he recalled something he had heard, about drugs inducing paranoia in certain people.
With one hand he slammed shut the door of the mnemonic machine, and through the dark yellow-tinted glass of the door saw the subject’s expression change from serenity to terror.
Gutan glanced at the electric clip pad on the countertop to his left, noted the subject’s name, Anna Salazar, and the required machine settings. He began to make the settings.
Mnemo’s wide instrument console had a thousand tiny dials, half as many miniature toggles and levers, and ninety-three buttons so small they had to be pressed with a metal pick that was kept on a narrow, lipped shelf. All controls were numbered without explanation as to function, but the job chip implanted in Gutan’s cerebrum gave a smattering of information. The dial he was turning now, Number 271, was a sensory deprivator, tied in with the gelatin on Salazar’s body and designed to free the logjam of current events that was suppressing old memories. Sensory stimulation would follow.
The gelatin covering Salazar’s body glowed pale red for an instant, indicating Sensory Deprivation engaged.
Professor Pelter referred to the gelatin as a “Variable Texture Suit,” an electrically conductive surface that could make a subject believe he was wearing any manner of clothing, touching any surface, tasting any type of food ever created, smelling any smell. Pelter had refined and identified more than 600,000 different smells, nearly 100,000 different sounds, thousands more textures, temperatures, and tastes. His remarkable machine could simulate any of these sensory enhancers in infinite variety, carrying a subject back in his memory to lives long forgotten.
Gutan knew from his own experiences before this job that were legion. Sometimes as an adult he picked up the pungent aroma of shrubbery that was reminiscent of a yard he used to pass on the way to elementary school. Prison-system cooking aromas were like those of school cafeterias, and embalming fluid odors brought back days spent in the family funeral home. So Mnemo’s capabilities hadn’t surprised Gutan that much.
He lifted a small blue lever in a vertical channel on the console, until it reached the numeral “1.” A brief blue glow in the gelatin indicated Sensory Stimulation engaged, a phase-one injection. They were starting her out slowly, getting her used to the machine. It had to be easier on the body that way, and to this extent she seemed lucky. Automatic testing would follow, for dream images and recent memories, with subtle suggestions from the machine based upon information programmed into it about the subject’s life history.
When the government computer beeped twice, as it would in a few minutes, Gutan would set the stimulator lever on “2,” and so on. Then to other controls, bringing more power, and back the subject would go. In a sense, Gutan and the Feds monitoring the equipment went along for the ride. Even Pelter went along, for his one-of-a-kind machine still lived.
Another dial, Number 140, was a Climate Control setting, and this Gutan set on zero to begin, neutral. He wouldn’t have to reset it for this subject, since Mnemo’s built-in computer would take over when things really got rolling. If a subject was experiencing a life in ancient Afsornia, for example (as in the recent case of a dispatchee at San Felipe Penitentiary), the computer would set temperature, humidity, and air components according to known historical data and probabilities—thus enhancing the odds of stimulating more memories. All the foods, ancient and modern, were in other automatic mechanisms that Gutan didn’t have to fool with.
Some of the settings involved the injection of memory-enhancing nutrients, such as lecithin, phosphatidylcholine, arginine vasopressin, and thiamine. Varying combinations of these and other neurotransmitters softened neuron membranes, produced acetylcholine in the tissues, improved synaptic connections, and made further structural and chemical renovations, thus maximizing the ability of the brain to accept sensory stimulators.
Gutan stepped back, saw his own reflection clearly in the tinted mnemonic machine door, with Salazar visible beyond.
Like a camera lens adjusting focal length, he focused on Salazar, then back on his own reflection and then to the entire mnemonic machine itself. The machine was taller than Gutan and pentahedral front and back, but not at the sides. The flat surfaces circumnavigating the sides gave it the appearance of a big wheel that needed further refinement by its inventor before it would roll. It was pale yellow alloy, of indeterminate composition, with a darker yellow-tinted oblong door taking up most of the front and an oblong LCD screen on top. The wide console was separate, on the side of the door, and linked to the machine via the entrance platform, which apparently had cables concealed within it.
On schedule, Gutan threw on the red master power switch. Salazar’s body jerked, and the LCD screen projected an explosion of orange followed by a wild array of other colors. A landscape came into focus: high arched streetlight in the foreground with a long driveway beyond, leading to a barn-shaped house. Colors faded to black and white, then contrast darkened and the screen became black.
Salazar jerked again, hideously, and a “pop” sound issued from the machine. Six faces of men and women appeared side by side, then drew back, revealing frumpy-clothed forms. The clothing fell away, reappeared and fell away again.
A whirl of faces, landscapes, buildings and colors filled the screen. Cars, homes and household articles appeared, from centuries past. They were going fast, piling on top of one another. The ferocious, hate-crazed image of a man came into focus, and suddenly the image folded in upon itself, turned inside out. Salazar screamed, the most awful, gut-wrenching sound in all of creation. Her arms ripped free of their restraint straps, flailed wildly, and her face was a picture of hideous terror, features distorted beyond recognition.
For an instant Gutan saw his own reflection in the glass: His eyes were feral, satanic.
Salazar’s body went limp, the screen grew dark and all became silent except for Gutan’s labored breathing. It always ended like this, with overwhelming images that stopped everything.
Mnemo’s life-support systems couldn’t keep subjects alive when they went into trauma, and this seemed to be a great failing of the machine. Perhaps Professor Pelter should have worked in close or closer collaboration with medical technicians. Maybe he relied too much on his own knowledge, tried to do too much himself.
These thoughts took but an instant, as in a dream. Gutan had experienced them previously, and more rapidly each time, perfecting them it seemed, honing them and getting them out of his way.
He became frenzied, and beyond his own reflection saw what he wanted. He threw open Mnemo’s door, and in a superhuman effort freed Salazar’s massive cadaver from the seat and dragged it out.
Twenty minutes later she was quick-chilled and lay in bed beneath Gutan. He used the slippery electropulmonary gel still on her to perform the sexual act, but rationalized that he wasn’t a complete degenerate.… He didn’t do this with children, and with a man only once—an act of desperation.
Only after the passion subsided did his recurring worry about surveillance surface, those Federal eyes he suspected were everywhere. Why didn’t they put him under arrest? They had to know! The airspace once occupied by his severed finger throbbed from the cold, and he thrust the entire hand between his thighs, seeking warmth.
The sleeping compartment was permeated with the strawberry odor of gel, and Gutan felt unclean.
A wave of guilt struck him and he thought: I’m an ungodly son of a bitch if there ever was one! Why do I do these terrible things?
He felt helpless to change. Why bother? When a life has as many debits as mine, nothing I do now can change the balance. Perhaps if I had started to change earlier, if I’d tried to overcome … But now my acts are heaped around me and I can’t get past them. It’s easier to continue.…
He sat up despondently, sank his face into his upturned hands. They reeked of gel.
I’ve always taken the easiest path. The choices I’ve made have not been thought out.
Fear, always just beneath the surface of every other emotion he felt, flooded away the guilt and inundated it in a terrible wash of terror. His terror grew with each infraction, and beneath these torrents that threatened to drown him, he heard the rapid drumbeat of his heart, increasing in tempo with each passing moment.
Sweat dripped into his eyes, stung them. Pain from his missing finger ran up his arm into his brain. It was nearly unbearable.
In the dark, Gutan crawled over the mountainous form and stumbled out of bed, groping toward the bedstand for his opium pipe.