We Can Build You

  “I’m not frightened. It’s just too much for me. When I was a kid in junior high Lincoln was my hero; I gave a report on him in the eighth grade. You know how it is when you’re a kid, everything you read in books is real. Lincoln was real to me. But of course I really spun it out of my own mind. So what I mean is, my own fantasies were real to me. It took me years to shake them, fantasies about the Union cavalry and battles and Ulysses S. Grant … you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think someday somebody will make a simulacrum of you and me? And we’ll have to come back to life?”

  “What a morbid thought.”

  “There we’ll be, dead and oblivious to everything … and then we’ll feel something stirring. Maybe see a snatch of light. And then it’ll all come flooding in on us, reality once more. We’ll be helpless to stop the process, we’ll have to come back. Resurrected!” She shuddered.

  “It’s not that, what you’re doing; get that idea out of your mind. You have to separate the actual Lincoln from this—”

  “The real Lincoln exists in my mind,” Pris said.

  I was astonished. “You don’t believe that. What do you mean by saying that? You mean you have the idea in your mind.”

  She cocked her head on one side and eyed me. “No, Louis. I really have Lincoln in my mind. And I’ve been working night after night to transfer him out of my mind, back into the outside world.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s a dreadful world to bring him into,” Pris said. “Listen Louis. I’ll tell you something. I know a way to get rid of those awful yellowjackets that sting everybody. You don’t take any risk … and it doesn’t cost anything; all you need is a bucket of sand.”

  “Okay.”

  “You wait until night. So the yellow jackets are all down below in their nest asleep. Then you show up at their hole and you pour the bucket of sand over it, so the sand forms a mound. Now listen. You think the sand suffocates them. But it’s not quite like that. Here’s what happens. The next morning the yellow jackets wake up and find their entrance blocked with this sand, so they start burrowing up into the sand to clear it away. They have no place to carry it except to other parts of their nest. So they start a bucket brigade; they carry the sand grain by grain to the back of their nest, but as they take sand from the entrance more falls in its place.”

  “I see.”

  “Isn’t it awful?”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “What they do is they gradually fill their own nest with sand. They do it themselves. The harder they work to clear their entrance the faster it happens, and they suffocate. It’s like an Oriental torture, isn’t it? When I heard about this, Louis, I said to myself, I wish I was dead. I don’t want to live in a world where such things can be.”

  “When did you learn about this sand technique?”

  “Years ago; I was seven. Louis, I used to imagine what it was like down there in the nest. I’d be asleep.” Walking along beside me, she suddenly took hold of my arm and shut her eyes tight. “Absolutely dark. All around me, others like me. Then—thump. That’s the noise from above. Somebody dumping the sand. But it means nothing … we all sleep on.” She let me guide her along the sidewalk, pressing tightly against me. “Then we doze; we doze for the rest of the night, because it’s cold … but then daylight comes and the ground gets warm. But it’s still dark. We wake up. Why is there no light? We head for the entrance. All those particles, they block it. We’re frightened. What’s going on? We all pitch in; we try not to get panicked. We don’t use up all the oxygen; we’re organized into teams. We work silently. Efficiently.”

  I led her across the street; she still had her eyes shut. It was like leading a very tiny girl.

  “We never see daylight, Louis. No matter how many grains of sand we haul away. We work and we wait, but it never comes. Never.” In a despairing, strangled voice she said, “We die, Louis, down there.”

  I wound my fingers through hers. “What about the cup of coffee now?”

  “No,” she said. “I just want to walk.” We went on for a distance.

  “Louis,” Pris said, “those insects like wasps and ants … they do so much down in their nests; it’s very complicated.”

  “Yes. Also spiders.”

  “Spiders in particular. Like the trap-door spider. I wonder how a spider feels when someone breaks its web to pieces.”

  “It probably says ‘drat,’” I said.

  “No,” Pris said solemnly. “It gets furious, and then it abandons hope. First it’s sore—it would sting you to death if it could get hold of you. And then this slow, awful blind despair creeps over it. It knows that even if it rebuilds, the same thing is going to happen again.”

  “But spiders get right out there and rebuild.”

  “They have to. It’s inherited in them. That’s why their lives are worse than ours; they can’t give up and die—they have to go on.”

  “You ought to look on the bright side once in a while. You do fine creative work, like those tiles, like your work on the simulacra; think about that. Doesn’t that cheer you? Don’t you feel inspired by the sight of your own creativity?”

  “No,” Pris said. “Because what I do doesn’t matter. It isn’t enough.”

  “What would be enough?”

  Pris considered. She had opened her eyes, now, and all at once she disengaged her fingers from mine. It seemed automatic; she showed no awareness of doing it. A reflex, I thought. Such as spiders have.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that no matter how hard I work or how long or what I achieve—it won’t be enough.”

  “Who judges?”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t think that when you see the Lincoln come to life you’ll feel pride?”

  “I know what I’ll feel. Greater despair than ever.”

  I glanced at her. Why that? I wondered. Despair at success … it makes no sense. What would failure bring for you, then? Elation?

  “I’ll tell you one, out of the world of nature,” I said. “See what you make of it.”

  “Okay.” She listened intently.

  “One day I was starting into a post office in some town down in California and there were birds’ nests up in the eaves of the building. And a young bird had flown or dropped out and was sitting on the pavement. And its parents were flying around anxiously. I walked up to it with the idea of picking it up and putting it back up in the nest, if I could reach the nest.” I paused. “Do you know what it did as I came near?”

  “What?”

  I said, “It opened its mouth. Expecting that I would feed it.”

  Wrinkling her brow, Pris pondered.

  “See,” I explained, “that shows that it had known only life forms which fed and protected it and when it saw me even though I didn’t look like any living thing it had ever known it assumed I would feed it.”

  “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 yoursel
f. 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 composed! 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.

  Two tiny yellow finches, playing and fighting in the air, swept up against the hood of my car; I heard and felt nothing but I knew by their disappearance and the sudden silence that they had gone into the radiator grill. Cooked and dead in an instant, I said to myself, slowing the car. And sure enough, at the nex
t service station the attendant found them. Bright yellow, caught in the grill. Wrapping them in Kleenex I carried them to the edge of the highway and dropped them into the litter of plastic beer cans and moldering paper cartons there.

  Ahead lay Mount Shasta and the border station of California. I did not feel like going on. That night I slept in a motel at Klamath Falls and the next day I started back up the coast the way I had come.

  It was only seven-thirty in the morning and there was little traffic on the road. Overhead I saw something which caused me to pull off onto the shoulder and watch. I had seen such sights before and they always made me feel deeply humble and at the same time buoyed up. An enormous ship, on its way back from Luna or one of the planets, was passing slowly by, to its landing somewhere in the Nevada desert. A number of Air Force jets were accompanying it. Near it they looked no larger than black dots.

  What few other cars there were on the highway had also stopped to watch. People had gotten out and one man was taking a snapshot. A woman and a small child waved. The great rocketship passed on, shaking the ground with its stupendous retro-blasts. Its hull, I could see, was pitted, scarred and burned from its re-entry into the atmosphere.

  There goes our hope, I said to myself, shielding my eyes against the sun to follow its course. What’s it got aboard? Soil samples? The first non-terrestrial life to be found? Broken pots discovered in the ash of an extinct volcano—evidence of some ancient civilized race?

  More likely just a flock of bureaucrats. Federal officials, Congressmen, technicians, military observers, rocket scientists coming back, possibly some Life and Look reporters and photographers and maybe crews from NBC and CBS television. But even so it was impressive. I waved, like the woman with the small boy.

  As I got back into my car I thought, Someday there’ll be little neat houses in rows up there on the Lunar surface. TV antennae, maybe Rosen spinet pianos in living rooms …

  Maybe I’ll be putting repossession ads in newspapers on other worlds, in another decade or so.

  Isn’t that heroic? Doesn’t that tie our business to the stars?