Mazda rose to her feet. “It’ll hold them for a few minutes,” she said. “After that…”
The Reverend raised his eyes to the rafters. “I’m going to pray,” he announced. He filled his lungs.
“O Lord,” he boomed powerfully, “we beg thy blessing to preserve me and Mazda from the power of the ravens. We beg thy blessing to help us stay here and not be transported to the P&G’s cellars. Bless us, O Lord. Preserve us. And help us to make thine old-fashioned Christmas a living reality. Amen, O Lord. Amen!”
Mazda, too, was praying. Hands clasped over her diaphragm, head bowed, lips moving silently, she besought her bright divinity. “Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, the counter charm on the floor is fading. Preserve us! Mithras… Mithras, Savior, Lord!”
Prayer is a force. So is magic. So is the energy from Nous projectors. These varying forces met and collided in the air.
The collision made a sort of vortex, a small but uncomfortable knot in the vast, conscious field potential that is the Infinite part of Nous. There was momentarily an intense, horrible sense of pressure and tension in the very air. The substation hummed ominously. Then, with a burst of energy that blew out every generator from Tacoma to San Diego, the roof came off. All along the Pacific slope, and as far inland as Provo, Utah, it was as dark a Christmas as even the Reverend would have wished.
There was a pause. The noise of breaking timbers died away. The Reverend Adelburg and Mazda were looking upward frozenly, mouths open, necks outstretched. Then a gigantic hand reached in through the hole in the roof. A gigantic voice, even bigger than the hand, said in enormous and somehow Oxonian accents, “Very well.
It was just before sunrise on December 21st. The Christians, who would be strangled at dawn the next day and then burned in honor of the solstice, were gibbering away in their wicker cages. There were three cages full of them. Great progress was being made in stamping out the new heresy. The Christians would make a fine bright blaze.
The druid looked up at the cages, which were hanging from the boughs of three enormous oak trees, and nodded with satisfaction. His consort, Mahurzda, would find it a hard job strangling so many people. He’d have to help her. It would be a pleasant task.
Once more he nodded. He tested the edge of the sickle he was carrying. Then the druid who had been— would be—would have been—the Reverend Clem Adelburg hoisted up his long white robe and clambered up into the nearest of the oak trees to cut the sacred mistletoe.
WRYNECK, DRAW ME
“Lady satellite, let me tell how love was first born in me. After the first meeting with myself, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. The arrow of love had pierced me.
“My multiple charms enthralled me. How could I be so coldhearted? Didn’t I know how beautiful I was? Why didn’t I come back? Oh, why didn’t I come back?—But all I could see was the back of my own head.”
Thus Jake, in a rough paraphrase of Theocritus. “Jake” is what I call the worldwide (it’s so big that relativistic effects begin to appear toward its periphery)—the worldwide computer in which I am, as far as I can tell, the sole surviving independent personality. The others, billions and billions of them, have got thinner and thinner with the passage of time, until they dropped out of Jake’s banks entirely, or have blurred and melted together like marshmallows being stirred over a fire. But I’m one of the latest comers and, I suppose, younger than most. Anyhow, I can’t seem to find anyone else.
I wish I knew how long I’ve been here. A very long time, I think—long enough for me to get utterly fed up with making “thought flowers” and the rest of the gamut of “thought pleasures” that Jake afforded when I first came. Long enough for Jake to pass imperceptibly from being a vast storage-retrieval-potentiating installation to being a messy monster devoted to a strangely metaphysical passion for itself. A very long time.
I wonder who I was when I was alive, out in the world, before I joined Jake. I seem to remember—but there, it’s gone. I really have no idea. I don’t even know what sex I was. The nearest I can come to memory is something about a pall of poison that had spread out beyond the orbit of the earth. Faced with their zero choices, no wonder human beings chose to become sentient, and more or less gratified, units in Jake’s memory banks!
Has Jake turned to its “I love me” attitude because it’s incredibly bored? Or is it because there’s nobody else for it to fall in love with? I don’t know which it is, or whether something quite different is involved—but I feel very strongly that I’d better keep out of Jake’s way.
I keep wondering who I was. I could find out, of course—I might even be able to reconstitute myself in a ghostlike physical form. But such a use of power would immediately make Jake notice me. It just isn’t worthwhile. I prefer to stay what I am at present, though that doesn’t amount to much. A mouse wandering in a hollowed-out cheese, a thought rattling around in the big mechanical brain, comes pretty close to it.
Later: I just had a most disconcerting and unpleasant thought: Suppose I’m Jake? I shall have to meditate about this.
Later: No, I don’t think so. I remember my shock when I first realized that Jake had fallen in love with itself. There’s a world of difference between what’s left of my personality and Jake’s dreary madness. My main affekt is curiosity, plus a certain wan drive to survive. But Jake is wholeheartedly bent on wooing, winning, and enjoying the ultimate consummation with itself. Since it can put all the remaining resources of the planet into the endeavor, there may be fireworks. Was ever love so little fun? Poor Jake!
For myself, I feel more than ever like a thought hunting for somebody to think it. Life within the computer is the ultimate speculation on personal identity.
I wonder what it’s like outside now. Have Jake’s continuing activities increased the density and extent of the pall around what us ed to be called mother earth? It would be reasonable to think so: the power to maintain a billion billion personalities in Jake had to come from somewhere, and though they’ve all blurred together, they must still require much energy. The pall would be broken through now and then by breakthroughs of glaring solar radiation, unshielded now by the protective ozone layer of mother earth’s atmosphere. Or have things somehow got stabilized so that a little of the foison and plenty, the beauty and delight of the natural world, has been able to re- establish itself?
All I can do is ask rhetorical questions. I could create “thought organs” for myself, I suppose, but they would not be very accurate and, in any case, wouldn’t operate outside Jake’s admittedly capacious confines.
But I realize one thing now; that I have another
Yes, I hate it. And if this word seems rather strong, considering my wraithlike and tenuous existence, yet let it stand. Hate.
Throughout its long existence, humanity has carried on a love affair with itself. This hasn’t, of course, prevent ed them from murdering, torturing, raping, incinerating, and starving each other. Indeed, the millennia-long infatuation seems to have added fuel to their self-directed viciousness. I don’t intend to draw up a bill of particulars, but I wish I could spit in humanity’s collective face.
Well, never mind that. But I wish I had some sort of timing device. My biological clocks are gone, of course, and there are no orienting cues from the external world. In the treacly flow of events here I am aware of succession, but not of duration. I could make a “thought-clock”—or thought clypshydra, sundial, or other measuring device—but I’m afraid the diversion of power from Jake’s foredoomed self-pursuit might make Jake notice me. Polyphemus and Galatea. I’d better not.
I’m glad that I did create, and have held on to ever since I thought it into being, a “thought thought-
