“Why?”
“Why.” He considered. “I’ve no idea,” he said finally with a look of slight despair.
I laughed, and some of the tension drained out of me. He seemed both incongruous and real in this new world.
“Well”-he smiled-“a better beginning than I hoped for. And do you also have a name?”
“I have no name.”
“Disturbing,” Ciorden said. “In our worlds, all things have names. Surely your planet isn’t immune from the nasty habit?” He held out his arm for me. We might have been in Ezlann or in Za, going in to some state occasion.
“My name, like my beginning, is lost,” I said.
A wall opened, and a pair of blue sandals emptied themselves onto the floor. Ciorden leaned down and picked them up. He sighed.
“The computer is always overjoyed when the ship carries a passenger. Men who live in uniform and travel the same starways year after year bore it no end. There’s no excitement in guessing what they require. But you-not only new, but different, and a woman as well.”
“Does this-computer-brain-think and feel as a man would?” I asked him. I had imagined from the tone in which Rarm spoke of it that it was inanimate and passionless.
“Not as a man, perhaps. But as a being. Our scientists disagree with this. A machine, they say. But if there are no emotional quirks in the thing to begin with, it grows them. All Computer Masters would tell you the same. Now, don’t disappoint your admirer. Put on die sandals, and we’ll visit the Hub.”
The corridor beyond my rooms branched a little farther along into two fresh curving ways. Ciorden led me leftward, and a little farther on, when this corridor also branched, to the right. The walls and floors altered as we walked. There were no longer symbols indicating doors. Everything was silver as on the outside of the ship. The corridor ended apparently in a blank wall, but when we reached it, that section of floor and wall began to sink with us.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Ciorden said. “The Hub lies between this and the two lower decks. A flight of stairs would have done as well.”
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For a moment or so we remained in a cage of blank walls, falling, and then the vista of a new corridor slid into place in front of us, and we were still. The corridor was white. At the far end a silver symbol on the closed wall.
Ciorden went to the wall, and stood aside to let me enter first as the doors parted.
It was a large oval room, held hi a kind of luminous darkness. Each wall glowed metal, and the occasional eye of a light burned and extinguished itself. At the center of the room, a single metallic column reached for and obtained the ceiling. Colored panels smoldered like sleepy jewels across its surface. But I did not enter the room. I was afraid to touch the glittering spider’s web which threaded and cross-threaded over it, weaving every wall together without a break.
“I cannot enter, Ciorden,” I said.
“Oh”-Ciorden smiled-“I should explain. What you see are quite harmless light rays.” He stepped past me, and stood among them, his face and body abruptly latticed with color. “As you see, I don’t hurt them, neither do they hurt me. If, however, some intruder or madman ran in here to damage the Hub, the computer, reading his mind, would activate the rays to stun him and also to sound an alarm. A defense is essential here. It’s only in this one space that the computer stands vulnerable, naked, one might say, an opened heart revealing all its complexity of valves and mechanisms. Come.”
I followed him then, and was absorbed also into the web of light. He walked about the gently purring column, stroking it with one hand. Panels ignited and darkened.
“In here,” he murmured fondly, “endless knowledge, balanced judgment, and the intimate details of every life aboard this ship. We are at present fifty-two men. Each of our minds has a replica inside this metal covering, a much finer and more accurate mind than the one we carry inside our skulls. Every detail of our experience is caught here, the truth as it happened to us, not as we think it happened after twenty years of forgetting. Babies cry in this column, boys climb trees, and fall in love, and dream of the spacemen they long to become. Fifty-two unblurred memories.” He paused and looked at me. “And, of course, now yours also.”
Tangled in the web, my skin chilled stiffly.
“Mine? I am not of your worlds. How can I be-in there?”
“Because your brain contacted, overruled even, the brain of the computer. To serve you, it had to understand you, as it has to understand the crew of the ship, in order to serve
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them. That is the way in which it was built. Imagine,” he said, “imagine that one year ago you were given a wonderful food on some far planet, and you thought it had a certain taste of this and that, but you had forgotten, and were wrong. The food which the computer brought you would also be wrong. Allow it to penetrate your mind, and find what it really tasted like one year ago, and it can give you what you want. That is perhaps a frivolous example, but the basic principle holds true from a chosen meal to a man lying injured and unconscious and in need of help.”
“So,” I said, very softly, as if I might keep the thing from hearing me, “all my thought, memory, every atom of my life-is known to your computer.”
“Yes,” Ciorden said. “Known better than you know it yourself. You told me that your name, like your beginning, was lost. Inside this column nothing of you is lost. If you have a name, it is here, and the beginning of your life, which you have consciously forgotten, is remembered.”
My beginning. My child’s life before I had woken under the Mountain. The things which came in dreams, the swan lakes, the marble stairways, the leaping evil of the flame. Panic filled me. I did not stop for a moment to think why. I turned to the doorway of the room to run away, and Rarm stood there, the doors shut behind him. I did not know how much he had heard. All of it, it seemed. His face appeared dark and emotionless and without compassion, the face of Vazkor.
“You tricked me here,” I said to Ciorden. “And you also,” I said to the man in the doorway. I was terrified. I gripped my shaking hands together. “I never thought you gods. Now I see you are truly men, with all the petty curiosity of men. If I have given my brain to your machine I will give nothing further to you. Let me go. I will be no part of your outworld experiments on a race you consider inferior to your own.”
“I’m afraid,” Rarm said, “that you can’t leave this ship now. In the past few minutes we’ve lifted from the valley, and are now in orbit around your world.”
“I do not understand you,” I said. But I did.
“Ciorden,” Rarm said.
Ciorden brushed his hand along the column. The metal walls of the room melted. Only in a nightmare could I have believed such a thing to exist about me. On every side black skies filled with the searing white drops of stars. On every side, distance, the void, black walls pulling the soul outward
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through the eyes, to fall into limitless nothingness. And below, a bluish sphere hanging like a lantern. A world. The world that I had run through, which had seemed so solid and so huge to me.
The need to cling to something stable was unbearable. I turned to the metal pillar and hid my face against it. shutting’ my eyes, holding to it, as if to let go would be to send myself spinning into the black emptiness forever.
And under my hands, the pillar throbbed and whined.
3
Trees, growing from metallic channels in the floor, spread their green feathers against the high roof, dusted black .feathers of shadows across the painted walls of this indoor garden of another planet. Elongated red flowers spilled like blood from urns of glass.
I sat among the flowers, smelling their strange scent, watching him look at me. I was not entirely sure how I had come here. There had been sound and burning lights, and alarms like the alarms of war. Their ship had responded to my horror until Ciorden presumably managed to quiet it. Then Rarm must have brought me to this place, as if these strange growing things could put an end to the hollow icy tension in the pit of my belly, which had come with the knowledge of the .blackness all around me. I was glad to have inconvenienced them. Yet it was all the pleasure I had.