More Than Human

up-draft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse.

He walked most of the night with it and installed it in the dim early hours of the morning. The idea of ‘pleasant surprise’ was far too whimsical a thing for Lone but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted it ready for the day’s work, without any time lost by the old man prancing around asking questions that he couldn’t answer.

The truck stood bogged in the field. Lone unwound the device from around his neck and shoulders and began to attach it according to the exact instructions he had winnowed out of Baby. There wasn’t much to do. A slender wire wrapped twice around the clutch housing outside and led to clamps on the front spring shackles, the little brushes touching the insides of the front wheels; and that was the front-wheel drive. Then the little box with its four silvery cables, box clamped to steering post, each cable leading to a corner of the frame.

He got in and pulled the knob towards him. The frame creaked as the truck seemed to raise itself on tiptoe. He pushed the knob forward. The truck settled its front axle and differential housing on solid ground with a bump that made his head rock. He looked at the little box and its lever admiringly, then returned the lever to a neutral position. He scanned the other controls there, the ones which came with the truck: pedals and knobs and sticks and buttons. He sighed.

He wished he had wit enough to drive a truck.

He got out and climbed the hill to the house to wake Prodd. Prodd wasn’t there. The kitchen door swung in the breeze, the glass gone out of it and lying on the stoop. Mud wasps were building under the sink. There was a smell of dirty dry floorboards, mildew, and ancient sweat. Otherwise it was fairly neat, about the way it was when he and Prodd had cleaned up last time he was here. The only new thing there aside from the mud wasps’ nest was a paper nailed to the wall by all four corners. It had writing all over it. Lone detached it as carefully as he could, and smoothed it out on the kitchen table, and turned it over twice. Then he folded it, put it in his pocket. Again he sighed.

He wished he had sense enough to learn to read.

He left the house without looking back and plunged into the forest. He never returned. The truck stood out in the sun, slowly deteriorating, slowly weakening its already low resistance to rust, slowly falling to pieces around the bright, strong, strange silver cables. Powered inexhaustibly by the slow release of atomic binding energy, the device was the practical solution of flight without wings, the simple key to a new era in transportation, in materials handling, and in interplanetary travel. Made by an idiot, harnessed idiotically to replace a spavined horse, stupidly left, numbly forgotten… Earth’s first anti-gravity generator.

The idiot!

Dear loan I’ll nale this up wher you cant hep see it I am cleering ot of here I dont no why I stade as long as I did. Ma is back east Wmsport pennsilvana and she been gone a long time and I am tied of wating. And I was goin to sell the truck to hep me on the way but it is stuck so bad now I cant get it to town to sell it. So now I am jest goin to go whatever and Ill make it some way long as I no Ma is at the othr end. Dont take no trouble about the place I guess I had enuf of it Anyway. And borrow any thing you want if you should want any Thing. You are a good boy you been a good frend well goodbeye until I see you if I ever do god Bless you your old frend E. Prodd.

Lone made Janie read him the letter four times in a three-week period, and each reading seemed to add a fresh element to the yeasty seething inside him. Much of this happened silently; for some of it he asked help.

He had believed that Prodd was his only contact with anything outside himself and that the children were merely fellow occupants of a slag dump at the edge of mankind. The loss of Prodd – and he knew with unshakeable certainty that he would never see the old man again – was the loss of life itself. At the very least, it was the loss of everything conscious, directed, cooperative; everything above and beyond what a vegetable could do by way of living.

‘Ask Baby what is a friend.’

‘He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.’

But then, Prodd and his wife had shucked him off when he was in the way, after all those years, and that meant they were ready to do it the first year and the second and the fifth – all the time, any time. You can’t say you’re a part of anything, anybody, that feels free to do that to you. But friends… maybe they just didn’t like him for a while, maybe they loved him all the way through.

‘Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love.’

‘He says only if you love yourself.’

His bench-mark, his goal-point, had for years been that thing which happened to him on the bank of the pool. He had to understand that. If he could understand that, he was sure he could understand everything. Because for a second there was this other, and himself, and a flow between them without guards or screens or barriers – no language to stumble over, no ideas to misunderstand, nothing at all but a merging.

What had he been then? What was it Janie had said?

Idiot. An idiot.

An idiot, she had said, was a grown person who could hear only babies’ silent speech. Then – what was the creature with whom he had merged on that terrible day?

‘Ask Baby what is a grown person who can talk like the babies.’

‘He says, an innocent.’

He had been an idiot who could hear the soundless murmur. She had been an innocent who, as an adult, could speak it.

‘Ask Baby what if an idiot and an innocent are close together.’

‘He says when they so much as touched, the innocent would stop being an innocent and the idiot would stop being an idiot.’

He thought, An innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What’s so beautiful about an innocent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby’s: It’s the waiting that’s beautiful.

Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.

Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something… and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn’t worth it.

What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to… Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?

‘Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.’

‘He says, every kind.’

‘What kind,’ Lone whispered, ‘am I, then?’

A full minute later he yelled, ‘What kind?’

‘Shut up a while. He doesn’t have a way to say it… uh… Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.’

‘I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.’

‘The head, silly.’

Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and – the head to direct it.

‘And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!’

‘He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.’

So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.