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the calves of his legs and in his shoulders. Half-screened thoughts flitted
about on the edge of his awareness.
I'm avoiding something, he thought. Hiding my awareness from something . . .
that . . . frightens . . .
"What's wrong with you, Raj?" Timberlake demanded; there was sudden concern in
his voice.
Flattery put out a hand, grasped a stanchion to keep himself from collapsing.
He closed his eyes, conjured up the image of the sacred graphic imprinted on
his cell in quarters -- picturing against his eyelids the field of serenity
with its suggestion of holy faces and the dynamics of the overprinting that
combined the religious symbols on which men had spent their faith and yearning
throughout evolutionary eons.
They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, Flattery told himself.
Lord, let this strength be transformed in the renewal of our minds. Let us
share the light.
The litany hung suspended in his consciousness, focused on the word "mind,"
and Flattery's mental image of the sacred graphic took on motion. The field
of serenity and sacred symbols dissolved into writhing atoms, drew a new
pattern like the outline of a great river with its watershed.
Flattery opened his eyes to find the interior of this metal trap were he stood
with Timberlake washed in golden light -- glaring, yet soft.
Timberlake seemed unaware of the light, frozen in some private instant.
And Flattery found himself caught by the wonder of that revelation -- a great
river and its watershed.
All men are parts of the total stream, he thought. We are tributaries -- and
our minds are tributaries, and our most private thoughts. Every pattern in
the universe contributes to the whole -- some gushing like a freshet and some
no more than a single touch of dew. All structure is an expression of the
same law.
It was holographic -- he saw that. The essential elements of the whole were
carried in the smallest part. From the grain of sand you could project the
universe. It could very well be the most elemental law of this universe.
The law was like a pulsing thread that he could experience but not express --
simplicity becoming new complexity and again a greater simplicity that
fragmented into a greater complexity that produced a greater simplicity . . .
He felt it in the touch of the suit's fabric against his skin, in the
awareness of the washed air entering his lungs, in every sensory impression.
How clean and unique was this shower of molecules upon his person and upon
this place he occupied in the dancing pattern!
"I thank Thee, Lord, for this enlightenment," he whispered.
And Flattery held himself in this supraliminal awareness, staring now at
Timberlake. Timberlake appeared to him . . . somehow dead. He moved, but his
eyes behind the faceplate were like holes in skull sockets. Each movement was
the sticklike articulation of a skeleton.
Remembering Prudence and Bickel, Flattery felt that they shared this deadness:
eyes empty of life. Their breasts moved with breathing, but the labored
irregularity of that motion contained the same pattern (differing only in
degree) as the breathing of a terminal sickness, the breathing of a dying
person preserved beyond his time by artificial means.
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We're doomed, Flattery thought. Lord, why didst Thou enlighten me only to
show me this?
The skeletonlike Timberlake and dead-alive images in his memory filled
Flattery with rage. He pulled himself upright against the stanchion,
screamed: "You're dead! Zombies! You're already dead! Zombies!"
As quickly as the rage had come it fled him, and he felt himself crying
softly. The feeling of enlightenment drained away. It had come in the space
of ten heartbeats and left in the space of a single pulse. The golden light
faded and the plasteel lock that trapped him with Timberlake was only that --
a room of too solid walls, too small, its light too cold, and the air his suit
provided was too charged with the omnipresent stinks of recycling.
"Raj, you've got to control yourself," Timberlake was saying.
But God controls us, Flattery thought. And God has told me what I must do.
He permitted me a religious experience that I might see our doom and --
encompassing it -- fulfill it.
Timberlake took a deep breath, feeling the tightness in his chest. He felt
faintly ill, his fear at their helplessness compounded by Flattery's near
panic. He and Flattery were as trapped here as that cow embryo had been.
He thought of that helpless embryo in the Holstein section of the farm-stock
hyb tanks -- a bit of protoplasm attached to the life-system tubes with its
own special code. It had been a unique identity, and Timberlake felt he had
known that particular animal -- could project its lost potential forward in
his mind to see it grazing and fulfilling its natural functions as a producer
of energy.
All that natural potential had been sacrificed, becoming merely units of
cerebral excitation in the development of a mechanical consciousness. Any
other function of possibility had been lost in the instant of its deliberate
destruction. It had become a thing of the senses -- unreal, receding into the
past, its atoms dissipated in the time void. There could be nothing private
or individual or unique about it from that instant of death onward. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]