Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM
amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods
in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. "It's another shuck," I told
them. "Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his
mind over that one. We'll hike all that way and it'll be putrified or some damn thing.
I say forget it. Stay here, it'll have to come up with something pretty soon or we'll
die."
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we'd last eaten. Worms. Thick,
ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting
thin. It couldn't be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn't matter much.
Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated
and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. "I've got to have something, Ted. Maybe there'll be some
Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let's try it."
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though.
She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came,
so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back
there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as
it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine ...
the paternal ... the patriarchal ... for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the
Deranged.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us uptodate on the date. The
passage of time was important; not to us, sure as hell, but to him ... it ... AM.
Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own
and each other's wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make
sure that, if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be
safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn't matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when
we were lying out under the blistering sunthing he had materialized, he sent down
some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.
On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting
carcasses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as
with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a
matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own worldfilling bulk, or
perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented
him—now long since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.
There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near
the surface. But we didn't try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out
there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years.
Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were
only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.
I heard Ellen saying frantically, "No, Benny! Don't, come on, Benny, don't
please!"
And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for
several minutes. He was saying, "I'm gonna get out, I'm gonna get out ..." over and
over. His monkeylike face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and
sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the
"festival" were drawn down into a mass of pinkwhite puckerings, and his features
seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the
five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.
But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the
foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out
circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to
escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the
face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components.
He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him
to resemble.
Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and
went up it, handoverhand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty
feet above us.
"Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before—" She cut off. Tears
began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.
It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to
happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had
altered Benny, during the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not
merely Benny's face the computer had made like a giant ape's. He was big in the
privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from
him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristinepure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and
she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventyfive years
earlier. Gorrister kicked her in the side.
Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light,
something that began to glow from Benny's eyes, and pulse with growing loudness,
dim sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in
tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the
boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mewl like a
wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted,
then louder as his shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was
trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk's. His
head tilted to the side. The sad little monkeyface pinched in anguish. Then he began
to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. I
slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out, it cut through
easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.
And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his
feet like a puppet. The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round
beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell
forward, straight down, and hit the platesteel floor with a crash. He lay there jerking
spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound spiraled up out
of normal range.
Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and
he was left lying there, crying piteously.
His eyes were two soft, moist pools of puslike jelly. AM had blinded him.
Gorrister and Nimdok and myself ... we turned away. But not before we caught the
look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face.
(1257 words)
