Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

If you could see yourself through someone else's eyes, you might find yourself to be a total stranger. Then you could share my experience last night, seeing myself a player in that scene, when Sand came to the campus just a year ago. Scribbling along, I could not stop, for the whale's rhythm is easily lost. But now, as my sailboat drifts off this nameless coast, I must explain. The bearded man at the gate was none other than myself.

Allow me now to formally identify myself. I am the final servant of Synapse, the watchman at the campus gate. I am not really, I assure you, that much of a barbarian. Mara Gould would not have an uncultured savage for a companion. As for the dog, pets were really once quite common. My name is Barney, and I am, or at least I was, a gardener and a gamekeeper. Now I am a sailor. Now my faithful dog is somewhere, left behind to fend for himself, just like my birds. I had a collection of birds at the campus. Not just pigeons and sea gulls, but all colors, with exotic names. I had robins and cardinals, orioles and purple martins. I even had one pair of downy woodpeckers. I wonder how many are still alive?

Now I understand what Don Andrews must have felt, not knowing whether Backdoor had survived the invasion of the mindless, their blank eyes reflecting the will of Benjamin Holly. The View From The Hilltop was inside them, as they stormed into Backdoor through the ferry port. They caught the town's inhabitants unarmed, and captured them. They melted down Backdoor's main power source and left the giant doors of the cathedral open to the vacuum of space. How can such a place be uninhabited? And yet the brick buildings of the campus now echo just as empty.

Although my present state is an extreme, I have always been a quiet and peaceful man. That is why Sand's view of me was so startling. I had no idea my countenance could be so fierce.

But if I had learned to be short with them, then I had my reasons. Wandering in from the city, stinking of their mindless cesspool, the addicts of the medium were always after something. I knew this one though. He had grown up, but I recognized him. Sand, the little boy who had run away to join his father. This was Mara's child. As I walked in from the gate that day I wondered whether to tell her that after all these years, Sand had returned. But why hadn't he told me who he was?

The thumpers needed tuning, so I played with them until the earth shook, shattering the delicate filaments of any spiders tunneling near. But my mind was still on Sand.

When I entered her office, Mara was standing by the window. The sun-drenched, stagnant dust swirled leisurely, and the lines in Mara's face seemed as old as the initials carved into the desks.

"Look at this, Barney," she said without turning from the window. She touched a branch of ivy crawling in at the sill. I started to say that I would cut it back, but then realized that she wasn't thinking about ivy.

"Who was at the gate?" she asked.

"No one," I answered. "A man from the city."

"No message from Don Andrews?"

"None," I replied.

There was a long pause, and then came, almost word for word, what I knew would come. It had hardly changed for months.

"He will come here eventually," she said. "He must come. He knows that we're here."

For a moment I was afraid she would continue, as she often did, on and on about how Don Andrews was our last remaining hope, about how we in turn could help him. But her thoughts had drifted. The birds outside appeared distorted through the ancient window panes. They made her remember another time.

She thought of a young woman with soft brown hair fastened out of the way. Her eyes were motionless. Their tiny muscles had been paralyzed by injections and her limp eyelids were held open by soft black rings.

The young woman could feel nothing from the floating oily body-temperature of the tank's interior. Her gelatin-coated tongue and nasal passages magnified the featureless surroundings.

Mara was not alone. There was one thing besides herself, a single dot which darted and stabbed across an indeterminable void, now blue, now green, now at the center, and now dancing off to the side. While the dot methodically explored her retina, interference patterns scanned her optic nerve, learning the routines of every neuron.

The machine that did all this, the first attempt to make a simultron, was vivid in her memory. Cylindrical, metal, tomb-like, sprouting matted masses of wires and tubes. She had built it herself, and lying in it she would be the first to use the simultron.

Mara was not afraid when the rings pulled back from her eyes. Slowly, the paralytic drugs opened their vise, leaving her cheeks hot and twitchy as if she had been smiling too long. In total seclusion she awaited the next phase of the experiment.

There was a picture hung in a room where she had been a child, a picture of a dog jumping off a wharf. Someone had thrown something into the water. It was a beautiful dog, suspended in mid air, long brown-red hair twisted off into a blur.

That picture was placed in front of the machine's crystal eye, so that it could be transmitted directly to her optic nerve. No light entered her eyes, but millions of cells came alive. Ordered patterns pulsed inward along the neural filaments.

The picture was there.

Mara could move her eyes, she could feel them move. Back and forth, like a blind person she searched. The dog was there, just below the center of her vision, falling. She shut her eyes but the picture still remained. She cried out, but it would not stop.

Outside, the birds were laughing and chattering. She could see them through the dusty window pane, building nests all through the ivy. Mara turned and looked at me across the classroom.

"Listen to them," I said. "They're not worried."

"They should be," Mara replied.

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