“What does that mean to you?”
“It shows that there’s benevolence and kindness and mutual love and selfless assistance in nature as well as cold awful things.”
Pris said, “No, Louis; it was ignorance on the bird’s part. You weren’t going to feed it.”
“But I was going to help it. It was right to trust me.”
“I wish I could see that side of life, Louis, like you do. But to me–it’s just ignorance.”
“Innocence,” I corrected.
“That’s the same; innocence of reality. It would be great if you could keep that, I wish I had kept it. But you lose that by living, because living means to experience, and that means–”
“You’re cynical,” I told her.
“No, Louis. Just realistic.”
“I can see it’s hopeless,” I said. “Nobody can break through and reach you. And you know why? Because you want to be the way you are; you prefer it. It’s easier, it’s the easiest way of all. You’re lazy, on a ghastly scale, and you’ll keep on until you’re forced to be otherwise. You’ll never change by yourself. In fact you’ll just get worse.”
Pris laughed, sharply and coldly.
So we walked back without saying anything more to each other.
When we returned to the repair shop we found the Stanton watching Bob Bundy as he labored on the Lincoln.
To the Stanton, Pris said, “This is going to be that man who used to write you all those letters about getting soldiers pardoned.”
The Stanton said nothing; it gazed fixedly at the prone figure, its face lined and stiff with a sort of haughty aloofness. “So I see,” it replied at last. It cleared its throat noisily, coughed, struck a pose in which it put its arms behind its back and clasped its fingers together; it rocked back and forth, still with the same expression. This is my business, it seemed to be saying. Everything of public importance is my business.
It had, I decided, taken up much the same stance that it had assumed during its authentic earlier lifetime. It was returning to its customary posture. Whether this was good or not I could not say. Certainly, as we watched the Lincoln we were all acutely aware of the Stanton behind us; we could not ignore it or forget it. Maybe that’s how Stanton had been during his lifetime, always there–no one could ignore him or forget him, no matter how they felt about him otherwise, whether they hated him or feared him or worshiped him.
Pris said, “Maury, I think this one’s already working out better than the Stanton one. Look, it’s stirring.”
Yes, the prone Lincoln simulacrum had stirred.
“Sam Barrows ought to be here,” Pris said excitedly, clasping her hands together. “What’s wrong with us? If he could see it he’d be overwhelmed–I know he’d be. Even he, Maury, even Sam K. Barrows!”
It was impressive. No doubt of it.
“I remember when the factory turned out our first electronic organ,” Maury said to me. “And we all played it, all day long, until one in the morning; you remember?”
“Yes.”
“You and me and Jerome and that brother of yours with the upside down face, we made the darn thing sound like a harpsichord and a Hawaiian guitar and a steam calliope. We played all sorts of stuff on it, Bach and Gershwin, and then remember we made those frozen rum drinks with the blender–and after that, what did we do? We made up our own compositions and we found all types of tone settings, thousands of them; we made up new musical instruments that didn’t exist. We composedl And we got that tape recorder and turned it on while we composed. Boy. That was something.”
“That was the day.”
“And I lay down on the floor and worked the foot pedals that get those low notes–I passed out on the low G, as I recall. And it kept playing; when I came to the next morning that goddam low G was still sounding like a foghorn. Wow. That organ–where do you suppose it is now, Louis?”
“In someone’s living room. They never wear out because they don’t generate any heat. And they never need to be tuned. Someone’s playing tunes on it right now.”
“I’ll bet you’re right.”
Pris said, “Help it sit up.”
The Lincoln simulacrum had begun struggling, flailing with its big hands in an effort to sit up. It blinked its eyes, grimaced; its heavy features stirred. Both Maury and I jumped over and helped support it; god, it weighed a lot, like solid lead. But we managed to get it up to a sitting position at last; we propped it against the wall so it wouldn’t slide back down again.
It groaned.
Something about the noise made me shiver. Turning to Bob Bundy I said, “What do you think? Is it okay? It’s not suffering, is it?”
“I don’t know.” Bundy drew his fingers nervously again and again through his hair; I noticed that his hands were shaking. “I can check it over. The pain-circuits.”
“Pain-circuits!”
“Yeah, it has to have them or it’ll run into a wall or some goddam object and massacre itself.” Bundy jerked a thumb toward the silent, watching Stanton. “That’s got ’em, too. What else, for chrissakes?”
We were, beyond doubt, watching a living creature being born. It now had begun to take note of us; its eyes, jet black, moved up and down, from side to side, taking us all in, the vision of us. In the eyes no emotion showed, only pure perception of us. Wariness beyond the capacity of man to imagine. The cunning of a life form from beyond the lip of our universe, from another land entirely. A creature plopped into our time and our space, conscious of us and itself, its existence, here; the black, opaque eyes rolled, focusing and yet not focusing, seeing everything and in a sense not picking out any one thing. As if it were primarily in suspension, yet; waiting with such infinite reserve that I could glimpse thereby the dreadful fear it felt, fear so great that it could not be called an emotion. It was fear as absolute existence: the basis of its life. It had become separate, yanked away from some fusion that we could not experience–at least, not now. Maybe once we all had lain quietly in that fusion. For us, the rupturing was long past; for the Lincoln it had just now occurred–was now taking place.
Its moving eyes still did not alight anywhere, on anything; it refused to perceive any given, individual thing.
“Gosh,” Maury muttered. “It sure looks at us funny.”
Some deep skill was imbedded in this thing. Imparted to it by Pris? I doubted it. By Maury? Out of the question. Neither of them did this, nor had Bob Bundy whose idea of a good time was to drive like hell down to Reno to gamble and whore around. They had dropped life into this thing’s ear, but it was just a transfer, not an invention; they had passed life on, but it did not originate in any or all of them. It was a contagion; they had caught it once and now these materials had contracted it–for a time. And what a transformation. Life is a form which matter takes . . . I made that up as I watched the Lincoln thing perceive us and itself. It is something which matter does. The most astonishing–the one truly astonishing–form in the universe; the one which, if it did not exist, could never have been predicted or even imagined.
And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It’s fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear; much worse. Absolute _dread_. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy. Yet the Lincoln stirred, rose out of this. Why? Because it had to. Movement, action, were implied by the extensiveness of the dread. That state, by its own nature, could not be endured.
All the activity of life was an effort to relieve this one state. Attempts to mitigate the condition which we saw before us now.
Birth, I decided, is not pleasant. It is worse than death; you can philosophize about death–and you probably will: everyone else has. But birth! There is no philosophizing, no easing of the condition. And the prognosis is terrible: all your actions and deeds and thoughts will only embroil you in living the more deeply.
Again the Lincoln groaned. And then in a hoarse growl it mumbled words.
“What?” Maury said. “What’d it say?”
Bundy giggled. “Hell, it’s a voice-tape but it’s running through the transport backwards.”
The first words uttered by the Lincoln thing: uttered backward, due to an error in wiring.
8
It took several days to rewire the Lincoln simulacrum. During those days I drove from Ontario west through the Oregon Sierras, through the little logging town of John Day which has always been my favorite town in the western United States. I did not stop there, however; I was too restless. I kept on west until I joined the north-south highway. That straight road, the old route 99, goes through hundreds of miles of conifers. At the California end you find yourself going by volcanic mountains, black, dull and ashy, left over from the age of giants.