Beyond Control Page 9

  He knew it was the sea—what was left of the old, or a new one in the making. But it would be an empty, lifeless sea that some day would lap against a dry, lifeless shore. This would be a planet of rock and stone, of metal and snow and ice and water, but that would be all. No more life. He, alone, was useless. He was Adam, but there was no Eve.

  Evelyn waved gaily to him from the shore. She was standing alongside the white cottage with the wind snapping her dress to show the clean, slender lines of her figure. And when he came a little closer, she ran out to him and helped him. She said nothing—only placed her hands under his shoulders and helped him lift the weight of his heavy pain-ridden body. And so at last he reached the sea.

  It was real. He understood that. For even after Evelyn and the cottage had vanished, he felt the cool waters bathe his face. Quietly—Calmly—

  Here’s the sea, Crane thought, and here am I. Adam and no Eve. It’s hopeless.

  He rolled a little farther into the waters. They laved his torn body. Quietly—Calmly—

  He lay with face to the sky, peering at the high menacing heavensrand the bitterness within him welled up.

  “It’s not right!” he cried. “It’s not right that all this should pass away. Life is too beautiful to perish at the mad act of one mad creature—”

  Quietly the waters laved him. Quietly—Calmly—

  The sea rocked him gently, and even the agony that was reaching up toward his heart was no more than a gloved hand. Suddenly the skies split apart—for the first time in all those months—and Crane stared up at the stars.

  Then he knew. This was not the end of life. There could never be an end to life. Within his body, within the rotting tissues that were rocking gently in the sea was the source of ten million-million lives. Cells—tissues—bacteria—endamoeba—Countless infinities of life that would take new root in the waters and live long after he was gone.

  They would live on his rotting remains. They would feed on each other. They would adapt themselves to the new environment and feed on the minerals and sediments washed into this new sea. They would grow, burgeon, evolve. Life would reach out to the lands once more. It would begin again the same old re-repeated cycle that had begun perhaps with the rotting corpse of some last survivor of interstellar travel. It would happen over and over in the future ages.

  And then he knew what had brought him back to the sea. There need be no Adam—no Eve. Only the sea, the great mother of life was needed. The sea had called him back to her depths that presently life might emerge once more, and he was content.

  Quietly the waters rocked him. Quietly—Calmly—the mother of life rocked the last-born of the old cycle who would become the first-born of the new. And with glazing eyes Stephen Crane smiled up at the stars, stars that were sprinkled evenly across the sky. Stars that had not yet formed into the familiar constellations, nor would not for another hundred million centuries.

  City of Yesterday

  Terry Carr

  This is the story of a machine named Charles and a man named J-1001011. Both are deadly, the machine more so than the man. But this tightly told little tale depicts for us mankind’s most sinister invention, more dangerous than any machine: blind patriotic discipline, mindless loyalty—a force that drives humanity to its most terrible crimes.

  Terry Carr is a lanky Californian who, in a distinguished career as an editor, was responsible for publishing some of the most memorable science fiction books of the 1960’s. Now, having given up editing in favor of writing, he’s likely to make an equally valuable contribution to science fiction in the 1970’s and beyond.

  “WAKE UP,” said Charles, and J-1001011 instantly sat up. The couch sat up with him, jackknifing to form his pilot’s seat. J-1001011 noted that the seat was in combat position, raised high enough to give him an unobstructed vision on all sides of the planetflier.

  “We’re in orbit around our objective,” said Charles. “Breakout and attack in seven minutes. Eat. Eliminate.” J-1001011 obediently withdrew the red-winking tube from the panel before him and put it between his lips. Warm, mealy liquid fed into his mouth, and he swallowed at a regular rate. When the nourishment tube stopped, he removed it from his mouth and let it slide back into the panel.

  The peristalsis stimulators began, and he asked, “Is there news of my parents?”

  “Personal questions are always answered freely,” said Charles, “but only when military necessities have been completed. Your briefing for this mission takes precedence.” A screen lit up on the flier’s control panel, showing a 3-4 contour map of the planet they were orbiting.

  J-1001011 sighed and turned his attention to the screen.

  “The planet Rhinstruk,” said Charles. “Oxygen 13.7%, nitrogen 82.4%, plus inert gases. Full spacewear will be required for the high altitude attack pattern in effect on this mission.”

  The image on the screen zoomed in, selected one continent out of three he had seen revolving below, continued zooming down to near planet level. Charles said, “Note that this is a totally enemy planet. Should I be shot down and you somehow survive, there will be no refuge. If that happens, destroy yourself.”

  “The target?” the pilot asked.

  “The city you see below. It isn’t fully automated, but its defenses will be formidable anyway.” On the screen J-1001011 saw a towered city rising from a broad plain. The city was circular, and as the image sharpened with proximity he could make out individual streets, parkways . . . and beam emplacements. The screen threw light-circles on seven of these in all.

  “We will have nine fliers,” said Charles. “These beams will attempt to defend, but our mission will be simple destruction of the entire city, which presents a much larger target than any one of our fliers. We will lose between three and five of us, but we’ll succeed. Attack pattern RO-1101 will be in effect; you’ll take control of me at 30,000 feet. End of briefing.”

  The pilot stretched in his chair, flexed muscles in his arms and hands. “How long was I asleep?” he asked.

  “Eight months, seventeen days plus,” said Charles.

  That long! A quarter-credit for sleep time that would give him over two months on his term of service, leaving him . . . less than a year, Earth standard. J-1001011 felt his heart speed up momentarily, before Charles’s nerve-implants detected and corrected it. The pilot had been in service for nearly seven subjective years. Adding objective sleep time, it came out to over nineteen years. The sleep periods, during Hardin Drive travel between star systems, ate up his service term easily for him . . . but then he remembered, as he always did, that the objective time was still the same, that his parents, whoever and wherever they were, would be getting older at objective time rate on some planet.

  Nineteen years. They should still be alive, he thought. He remembered them from his childhood, on a planet where colors had been real rather than dyed or light-tinted, where winds had blown fresh and night had fallen with the regular revolution of the planet. He had had a name there, not a binary number—Henry, or Hendrick, or Henried; he couldn’t quite remember. When the Control machines had come for him he had been ten years old, old enough to know his own name, but they had erased it. They had had to clear his memory for the masses of minute data he’d need for service, so the machines had stored his personal memories in neat patterns of microenergy, waiting for his release.

  Not all of them, though. The specific things, yes: his name, the name of his planet, its exact location, the thousand-and-one details that machines recognize as data. But not remembered sights, smells, tastes: flower-bursts of color amid green vegetation, the cold spray of rainbowed water as he stood beside a waterfall, the warmth of an animal held in the arms. He remembered what it was like to be Henry, or Hendrick or Henried, even though he couldn’t remember the exact name of the person he had been.

  And he remembered what his parents were like, though he had no memory at all of their names. His father: big and rangy, with bony hands and an awkward walk and a deep, distant v
oice, like thunder and rain on the other side of a mountain. His mother: soft and quiet, a quizzical face framed by dark hair, somehow smiling even when she was angry, as if she weren’t quite sure how to put together a stern expression.

  By now they must be . . . fifty years old? Sixty? Or even a hundred and sixty, he thought. He couldn’t know; he had to trust what the machines told him, what Charles said. And they could be lying about the time he spent in sleep. But he had to assume they weren’t.

  “Breakout and attack in one minute,” Charles said.

  The voice startled him momentarily, but then he reached for his pressure helmet, sealed it in place with automatic movements, machine-trained muscle patterns. He heard the helmet’s intercom click on.

  “What about my parents?” he asked. “You have time to tell me before we break out. At least tell me if they’re still alive.”

  “Breakout and attack in thirty seconds and counting,” said Charles. “Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six . . .”

  J-1001011, human pilot of a planetflier named Charles, shook his head in resignation and listened to the count, bracing himself for the coming shock of acceleration.

  It hit him, as always, with more force than he had remembered, crushing him back into the chair as the planetflier rocketed out of the starship’s hold along with its eight unit-mates. Charles had opaqued the pilot’s bubble to prevent blinding him with sudden light, but the machine cleared it steadily as it drove downward toward the planet’s surface, and soon the man could make out the other fliers around him. He recognized the flying formation, remembered the circular attack pattern they’d be using—a devastating ring of fliers equipped with pyro-bombs. Charles was right. They’d lose some fliers, but the city would be destroyed.

  He wondered about the city, the enemy. Was this another pacification mission, another planet feeling strong in its isolation from the rest of GalFed’s far-flung worlds and trying to break away from central regulation? J-1001011 had been on dozens of such missions. But their attacks then hadn’t been destruct-patterns against whole cities, so this must be a different kind of problem. Maybe the city was really a military complex . . . even a stronghold of the Khallash. If they really existed.

  When men had first made contact with an alien race a century and a half before, they had met with total enmity, almost mindlessly implacable hatred. War had flared immediately—a defensive war on the part of the humans, who hadn’t been prepared for it. And in order to organize the loose-knit Galactic Federation efficiently, they’d computerized the central commands . . . and then the middle echelons . . . and finally, a little over a century ago, the whole of GalFed had been given to the machines to defend.

  Or so he had been taught. There were rumors, of course, that there were no Khallash any longer, that they’d been destroyed or driven off long ago . . . or that they’d never existed in the first place, that the machines had invented them as an excuse for their own control of GalFed. J-1001011 didn’t know. He’d never met the aliens in battle, but that proved nothing, considering the vastness of space and the many internal problems the machines had to cope with.

  Yet perhaps he would meet them now . . . in the city below.

  “Thirty thousand feet,” said Charles. “Attach your muscle contacts.”

  The pilot quickly drew from the walls of the compartment a network of small wires, one after the other, and touched each to magnetized terminals on his arms, hands, legs, shoulders. As he did so he felt the growing sensation of airflight: he was becoming one with the flier, a single unit of machine and man. Charles fed the sensory impressions into his nervous system through his regular nerve-implants, and as the muscle contacts were attached he could feel the flier’s rockets, gyros, pyrolaunchers all coming under his control, responding instantly to movements of his body’s muscles.

  This was the part that he liked, that almost made his service term worth it. As the last contact snapped into place, he became the planetflier. His name was Charles, and he was a whole being once more. Air rushed past him, mottled fields tilted far below, he felt the strength of duralloy skin and the thrust of rockets; and he was not just a flesh-and-blood human wombed in his pilot’s compartment, but a weapon of war swooping down for a kill.

  The machines themselves don’t appreciate this, he thought. Charles and the rest have no emotions, no pleasures. But a human does. . . and we can even enjoy killing. Maybe that’s why they need us—because we can love combat, so we’re better at it than them.

  But he knew that wasn’t true, only an emotional conceit. Human battle pilots were needed because their nervous systems were more efficient than any microminiaturized computer of the same size and mass; it was as simple as that. And human pilots were expendable where costly mechanization wouldn’t be.

  “Control is full now,” he said; but Charles didn’t answer. Charles didn’t exist now. Only the computer aboard the orbiting starship remained to monitor the planetflier below.

  In a moment the starship’s voice came to him through Charles’ receptors: “All human units are ready. Attack pattern RO-1101 will now begin.”

  The city was below him, looking just as it had on the contour map: wide streets, buildings thrusting up towards him, patches of green that must have been parks . . . or camouflage, it warned himself. The city was the enemy.

  He banked into a spiral and knifed down through the planet’s cold air. The other fliers fell into formation behind him, and as the starship cut in the intercommunications channels he heard the voices of other pilots: “Beautiful big target—we can’t miss it. Anybody know if they’re Khallash down there?”

  “Only the machines would know that, and if they’d wanted to tell us, they’d have included it in the briefing.”

  “It looks like a human city to me. Must be another rebel planet.”

  “Maybe that’s what the Khallash want us to think.”

  “It doesn’t matter who they are,” J-1001011 said. “They’re enemy; they’re our mission. Complete enough missions and we go home. Stop talking and start the attack; we’re in range.”

  As he spoke he lined his sights dead-center on the city and fired three pyrobombs in quick succession. He peeled off and slipped back into the flight circle as another flier banked into firing trajectory. Three more bombs flared out and downward, the second flier rejoined the pattern.

  Below, J-1001011’s bombs hit. He saw the flashes, one, two, three quick bursts, and a moment later red flames showed where the bombs had hit. A bit off center from where he had aimed, but close enough. He could correct for it on the next pass.

  More bombs burst below; more fires leaped and spread. The fliers darted in, loosed their bombs and dodged away. They were in a complete ring around the city now, the pattern fully established. It was all going according to plan.

  Then the beams from the city began to fire.

  The beams were almost invisible at a distance, just lightning-quick lances of destructive energy cutting into the sky. Not that it was important to see them—the fliers couldn’t veer off to evade them in time, wouldn’t even be able to react before a beam struck.

  But the planetfliers were small, and they stayed high. Any beam hits would be as much luck as skill.

  They rained fire and death on the city for an hour, each flier banking inward just long enough to get off three or four bombs, then veering out and up before he got too close. At the hour’s end the city below was dotted by fires, and the fires were spreading steadily. One of the planetfliers had been hit; it had burst with an energy release that buffeted J-1001011 with its shock wave, sending him momentarily off course. But he had quickly righted himself, re-entered the pattern and returned to the attack.

  As the destruction continued, he felt more and more the oneness, the wholeness of machine and man. Charles the other-thing was gone, merged into his own being, and now he was the machine, the beautiful complex mass of metals and sensors, relays and engines and weaponry. He was a destruction-machine, a death-flier, a sup
erefficient killer. It was like coming out of the darkness of some prison, being freed to burst out with all his pent-up hatreds and frustrations and destroy, destroy . . .

  It was the closest thing he had to being human again, to being . . . what was the name he had back on that planet where he’d been born? He couldn’t remember now; there was no room for even an echo of that name in his mind.

  He was Charles.

  He was a war-machine destroying a city—that and only that. Flight and power occupied his whole being, and the screaming release of hatred and fear within him was so intense that it was love. The attack pattern became, somehow, a ritual of courtship, the pyrobombs and destruction and fire below a kind of lovemaking whose insensitivity gripped him more and more fiercely as the attack continued. It was a red hell, but it was the only kind of real life he had known since the machines had taken him.

  When the battle was over, when the city was a flaming circle of red and even the beams had stopped firing from below, he was exhausted both physically and emotionally. He was able to note dimly, with some back part of his brain or perhaps through one of Charles’ machine synapse-patterns, that they had lost three of the fliers. But that didn’t interest him; nothing did.

  When something clicked in him and Charles’ voice said, “Remove your muscle contacts now,” he did so dully, uncaring. And he became J-1001011 again.

  Later, with the planetfliers back in the hold of the starship and awaiting the central computer’s analysis of the mission’s success, he remembered the battle like something in a dream. It was a red, violent dream, a nightmare; and it was worse than that, because it had been real.

  He roused himself, licked dry lips, said, “You have time now, Charles, to tell me about my parents. Are they alive?”

  Charles said, “Your parents do not exist now. They’ve just been destroyed.”