If a Pieta of a thousand years ago, shaped by a medieval artisan, anticipated in his—shall we say—psionic? hands, our future world, what, today, might be the analogue of that inspired, precognitive artifact? What do we have with us now, as homely and familiar to us in our twentieth-century world, as were those everyday Pietas to the citizens of thirteenth-century Christendom, that might be a microcosm of the far distant future? Let us first start by imagining a pious peasant of thirteenth-century France gazing up at a rustic Pieta and foreseeing in it the twenty-first-century society about which we science fiction writers speculate. Then, as in a Bergman film, we segue to—what now? One of us is gazing at—what?
Cycle—and recycle. The Pieta of our modern world: ugly, commonplace, and ubiquitous. Not the dead Christ in the arms of his grieving, eternal mother, but a heap of aluminum Budweiser beer cans, eighty feet high, thousands of them, being scooped up noisily, rattling and spilling and crashing and raining down as a giant automated, computer-controlled, homeostatic Budweiser beer factory—an autofac, as I called it once in a story [“Autofac” (1955)]—hugs the discarded empties back into herself to recycle them over again into new life, with new, living contents. Exactly as before… or, if the chemists in the Budweiser lab are fulfilling God’s divine plan for eternal progress, with better beer than before.
“We see as through a glass darkly,” Paul in 1 Corinthians—will this someday be rewritten as, “We see as into a passive infrared scanner darkly?” A scanner that as in Orwell’s 1984, is watching us all the time? Our TV tube watching back at us as we watch it, as amused, or bored, or anyhow somewhat as entertained by what we do as we are by what we see on its implacable face?
This, for me, is too pessimistic, too paranoid. I believe 1 Corinthians will be rewritten this way: “The passive infrared scanner sees into us darkly”—that is, not well enough really to figure us out. Not that we ourselves can really figure each other out, or even our own selves. Which, perhaps, too, is good; it means we are still in for sudden surprises, and, unlike the authorities, who don’t like that sort of thing, we may find these chance happenings acting on our behalf, to our favor.
Sudden surprises, by the way—and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you—are a sort of antidote to the paranoid… or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving—total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward. Not being what you thought, not doing right by you, not being just, but then sustaining you as by momentary caprice, but then abandoning you, or at least seeming to. What it is actually up to we may never know. But at least this is better, is it not, than to possess the self-defeating, life-defeating spurious certitude of the paranoid—expressed, by a friend of mine, humorously, I guess, like this: “Doctor, someone is putting something in my food it [sic; likely “to” intended] make me paranoid.” The doctor should have asked, was that person putting it in his food free, or charging him for it?
To refer back a final time to an early science fiction work with which we are all familiar, the Bible: A number of stories in our field have been written in which computers print out portions of that august book. I now herewith suggest this idea for a future society; that a computer print out a man.
Or, if it can’t get that together, then, as a second choice, a very poor one in comparison, a condensed version of the Bible, “In the beginning was the end.” Or should it go the other way? “In the end was the beginning.” Whichever. Randomness, in time, will sort out which it is to be. Fortunately, I am not required to make that choice.
Perhaps, when a computer is ready to churn forth one or the other of these two statements, an android, operating the computer, will make the decision—although, if I am correct about the android mentality, it will be unable to decide and will print out both at once, creating a self-canceling nothing, which will not even serve as a primordial chaos. An android might, however, be able to handle this; capable of some sort of decision-making power, it might conceivably pick one statement or the other as quote “correct.” But no android—and you will recall and realize that by this term I am summing up that which is not human—no android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me truly human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:
One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free—and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.
To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola Company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passing infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike—may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread did never live. But she and her friends—they, our human future, are our little song. “Who knows if the spirit of man travels up, and the breath of beasts travels down under the Earth?” the Bible asks. Someday it, in a later revision, may wonder, “Who knows if the spirit of men travels up, and the breath of androids travels down?” Where do the souls of androids go after their death? But—if they do not live, then they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always be with us. Do they have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do we?
I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place. But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future.
Thank you.
“Man, Android, and Machine” (1976)
WITHIN the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name “machines” to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them “androids,” which is my own way of using that word. By “android” I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being (as we saw in the excellent TV film The Questor Tapes). I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory—that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachael Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids—the Abraham Lincoln one in that book—and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinic
al entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate that his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving the theorem a twist: That which is a mental and moral island is not a man.
The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living toward reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical. We hold now no pure categories of the living versus the nonliving; this is going to be our paradigm: my character Hoppy, in Dr. Bloodmoney, who is a sort of human football within a maze of servo-assists. Part of that entity is organic, but all of it is alive; part came from a womb, all lives, and within the same universe. I am talking about our real world and not the world of fiction when I say: One day we will have millions of hybrid entities that have a foot in both worlds at once. To define them as “man” versus “machine” will give us verbal puzzle games to play with. What is and will be a real concern is: Does the composite entity (of which Palmer Eldritch is a good example among my characters), does he behave in a human way? Many of my stories contain purely mechanical systems that display kindness—taxicabs, for instance, or the little rolling carts at the end of Now Wait for Last Year that that poor defective human builds. “Man” or “human being” are terms that we must understand correctly and apply, but they apply not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world; if a mechanical construct halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its humanness, would be like our own earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul in man, and, not being able to find a specific organ located at a specific spot, opted to decline to admit that we have souls. As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision.
But still, we must realize that the universe, although kind to us in its entirety (it must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, “otherwise nature would have executed us long ago”), does contain grinning evil masks that loom out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain.
We must be careful, however, of confusing a mask, any mask, with the reality beneath. Think of the war mask that Pericles placed over his features: You would behold a frozen visage, the grimness of war, without compassion—no genuine human face or person to whom you could appeal. And this was, of course, the intention. Suppose you did not even realize it was a mask; suppose you believed, as Pericles approached you in the fog and half darkness of early morning, that this was his authentic countenance. Now, this is almost exactly how I described Palmer Eldritch in my novel about him: so much like the war masks of the Attic Greeks that the resemblance cannot be accidental. Is, then, the hollow eyeslot, the mechanical metal arm and hand, the stainless-steel teeth, which are the dread stigmata of evil—is this not, this which I myself first saw in the overhead sky at noon one day back in 1963, a description, a vision, of a war mask and metal armor, a god of battle? The God of Wrath who was angry with me. But under the anger, under the metal and helmet, there is, as with Pericles, the face of a man. A kind and loving man.
My theme for years in my writing has been, “The devil has a metal face.” Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli. This is a defensive measure, and if it works, the predator returns to his lair grumbling, “I saw the most frightening creature in the sky—wild grimaces and flappings, stingers and poisons.” His kin are impressed. The magic works.
I had supposed that only bad people wore frightening masks, but you can see now that I fell for the magic of the mask, its dreadful, frightening magic, its illusion. I bought the deception and fled. I wish now to apologize for preaching that deception to you as something genuine: I’ve had you all sitting around the campfire with our eyes wide with alarm as I tell tales of the hideous monsters I encountered; my voyage of discovery ended in terrifying visions that I dutifully carried home with me as I fled back to safety. Safety from what? From something which, when the need was gone for concealment, smiled and revealed its harmlessness.
Now I do not intend to abandon my dichotomy between what I call “human” and what I call “android,” the latter being a cruel and cheap mockery of the former for base ends. But I had been going on surface appearances; to distinguish the categories more cunning is required. For if a gentle, harmless life conceals itself behind a frightening war mask, then it is likely that behind gentle and loving masks there can conceal itself a vicious slayer of men’s souls. In neither case can we go on surface appearance; we must penetrate to the heart of each, to the heart of the subject.
Probably everything in the universe serves a good end—I mean, serves the universe’s goals. But intrinsic portions or subsystems can be takers of life. We must deal with them as such, without reference to their role in the total structure.
The Sepher Yezirah, a Cabbalist text, The Book of Creation, which is almost two thousand years old, tells us: “God has also set the one over against the other; the good against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good; the good is preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones.”
Underlying the two game players there is God, who is neither and both. The effect of the game is that both players become purified. Thus the ancient Hebrew monotheism, so superior to our own view. We are creatures in a game with our affinities and aversions predetermined for us—not by blind chance but by patient, foresighted engramming systems that we dimly see. Were we to see them clearly, we would abolish the game. Evidently that would not serve anyone’s interests. We must trust these tropisms, and anyhow we have no choice—not until the tropisms lift. And under certain circumstances they can and do. And at that point, much is clear that previously was occluded from us, intentionally.
What we must realize is that this deception, this obscuring of things as if under a veil—the veil of Maya, it has been called—this is not an end in itself, as if the universe is somehow perverse and likes to foil us per se; what we must accept, once we realize that a veil (called by the Greeks dokos) lies between us and reality, is that this veil serves a benign purpose. Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher, is historically credited with being the first person in the West systematically to work out proof that the world cannot be as we see it, that dokos, the veil, exists. We see very much the same notion expressed by St. Paul when he speaks about our seeing “as if by the reflection on the bottom of a polished metal pan.” He is referring to the familiar notion of Plato’s that we see only images of reality, and probably these images are inaccurate and imperfect and not to be relied on. I wish to add that Paul was probably saying one thing more than Plato in the celebrated metaphor of the cave: Paul was saying that we may well be seeing the universe backward.
The extraordinary thrust of this thought just simply cannot be taken in, even if we intellectually grasp it. “To see the universe backward?” What would that mean? Well, let me give you one possibility: that we experience time backward; or more precisely, that our inner, subjective category of experience of time (in the sense that
Kant spoke of, a way by which we arrange experience), our time experience, is orthogonal to the flow of time itself—at right angles. There are two times: the time that is our experience or perception or construct of ontological matrix, an extensiveness along with space as an inseparable extensiveness into another area—this is real, but the outer time flow of the universe moves in a different direction. Both are real, but by experiencing time as we do, orthogonally to its actual direction, we get a totally wrong idea of the sequence of events, of causality, of what is past and what is future, where the universe is going.
I hope you realize the importance of this. Time is real, both as an experience in the Kantian sense, and real in the sense which the Soviet Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev expresses it: that time is an energy, and it is the basic energy that binds the universe together, and upon which all life depends, all phenomena draw their source out of and express: It is the energy of each entelechy and of the total entelechy of the universe itself.
But time, in itself, is not moving from our past to our future. Its orthogonal axis leads it through a rotary cycle within which, for example, we have been “spinning our wheels,” so to speak, in a vast winter of our species that has lasted already about two thousand of our lineal time years. Evidently orthogonal time or true time rotates something like the primitive cyclic time, within which each year was regarded as the same year, each new crop the same crop; in fact, each spring was the same spring again. What destroyed man’s ability to perceive time in this overly simple way was that he himself as an individual spanned too many of these years and could see that he himself wore out, was not renewed each year like the corn crop, the bulbs and roots and trees. There had to be a more adequate idea of time than the simple cyclic time; so he developed, reluctantly, lineal time, which is an accumulative time, as Bergson showed; it goes in only one direction and is added to—or adds to—everything as it sweeps along.