In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

LOST MEMORY Peter Phillips

I collapsed joints and hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes in some discomfort.

“What do you want, Palil?” he asked complainingly.

“As if you didn’t know.”

“I can’t give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won’t spoil it for them?”

I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. “You owe me a favor,” I said. “Remember?”

“That was a long time in the past.”

“Only two thousand revolutions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I’ll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it.”

He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conðflict between his debt to me and his self-conceived duty.

Finally he said, “Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal.”

“In that form? Don’t be foolish. It’s obviously a manufacture. And I’m not conceited enough to believe that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe.”

“Tautologous phrasing, Palil,” Dak-whirr said pedanticðally. “There could not conceivably be ‘unintelligent manufacture.’ There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute—”

I tuned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dak-whirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there’s a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him.

The thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal.

In fact, I immediately thought of it as “he” and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us.

I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disðassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from.

Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions—space flight—only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph.

I felt a surge of sympathy for the lonely traveller as he lay there, still, silent, non-emitting. Anyway, I mused, even if we couldn’t restore him to self-knowing, an analysis of his construction might give us the secret of the power he had used to achieve the velocity to escape his planet’s gravity.

In shape and size he was not unlike Swen—or Swen Two, as he called himself after his conversion—who failed so disastrously to reach our satellite, using chemical fuels. But where Swen Two had placed his tubes, the stranger had a curious helical construction studded at irregular intervals with small crystals.

He was thirty-five feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinder. Standing at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet.

I am a reporter with warm current in my wires, not a cold-thinking scientist, so I hesitated before using my own vrulling sense. Even though the stranger was non-aware—perhaps permanently—I felt it would be a presumption, an invasion of privacy. There was nothing else I could do, though, of course.

I started to vrull, gently at first, then harder, until I was positively glowing with effort. It was incredible; his skin seemed absolutely impermeable.

The sudden realisation that metal could be so alien nearly fused something inside me. I found myself backing away in horror, my self-preservation relay working overtime.

Imagine watching one of the beautiful cone-rod-and-cylinder assemblies performing the Dance of the Seven Spanners, as he’s conditioned to do, and then suddenly refusing to do anything except stump around unattractively, or even becoming obstinately motionless, unresponsive. That might give you an idea of how I felt in that dreadful moment.

Then I remembered Dak-whirr’s words—there could be no such thing as an “unintelligent manufacture.” And a product so beautiful could surely not be evil. I overcame my repugðnance and approached again.

I halted as an open transmission came from someone near at hand.

“Who gave that squeaking reporter permission to snoop around here?”

I had forgotten the museum board. Five of them were standing in the doorway of the shed, radiating anger. I recognised Chirik, the chairman, and addressed myself to him. I explained that I’d interfered with nothing and pleaded for permission on behalf of my subscribers to watch their investigation of the stranger. After some argument, they allowed me to stay.

I watched in silence and amusement as one by one they tried to vrull the silent being from space. Each showed the same reaction as myself when they failed to penetrate the skin.

Chirik, who is wheeled—and inordinately vain about his suspension system—flung himself back on his supports and pretended to be thinking.

“Fetch Fiff-fiff,” he said at last. “The creature may still be aware, but unable to communicate on our standard freðquencies.”

Fiff-fiff can detect anything in any spectrum. Fortunately he was at work in the museum that day and soon arrived in answer to the call. He stood silently near the stranger for some moments, testing and adjusting himself, then slid up the electromagnetic band.

“He’s emitting,” he said.

“Why can’t we get him?” asked Chirik.

“It’s a curious signal on an unusual band.”

“Well, what does he say?”

“Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Wait, I’ll relay and convert it to standard.”

I made a direct recording naturally, like any good reporter.

“—after planetfall,” the stranger was saying. “Last dribble of power. If you don’t pick this up, my name is Entropy. Other instruments knocked to hell, airlock jammed and I’m too weak to open it manually. Becoming delirious, too, I guess. Getting strong undirectional ultra-wave reception in Inglish, craziest stuff you ever heard, like goblins muttering, and I know we were the only ship in this sector. If you pick this up, but can’t get a fix in time, give my love to the boys in the mess. Signing off for another couple of hours, but keeping this channel open and hoping . . .”

“The fall must have deranged him,” said Chirik, gazing at the stranger. “Can’t he see us or hear us?”

“He couldn’t hear you properly before, but he can now, through me,” Fiff-fiff,” pointed out. “Say something to him, Chirik.”

“Hello,” said Chirik doubtfully. “Er—welcome to our planet. We are sorry you were hurt by your fall. We offer you the hospitality of our assembly shops. You will feel better when you are repaired and repowered. If you will indicate how we can assist you—”

“What the hell! What ship is that? Where are you?”

“We’re here,” said Chirik. “Can’t you see us or vrull us? Your vision circuit is impaired, perhaps? Or do you depend entirely on vrulling? We can’t find your eyes and assumed either that you protected them in some way during flight, or dispensed with vision cells altogether in your conversion.”

Chirik hesitated, continued apologetically: “But we cannot understand how you vrull, either. While we thought that you were unaware, or even completely fused, we tried to vrull you. Your skin is quite impervious to us, however.”

The stranger said: “I don’t know if you’re batty or I am. What distance are you from me?”

Chirik measured quickly. “One meter, two-point-five centimeters from my eyes to your nearest point. Within touching distance, in fact.” Chirik tentatively put out his hand. “Can you not feel me, or has your contact sense also been affected?”

It became obvious that the stranger had been pitifully deranged. I reproduce his words phonetically from my record, although some of them make little sense. Emphasis, puncðtuative pauses and spelling of unknown terms are mere guesswork, of course.

He said : “For godsakemann stop talking nonsense, whoever you are. If you’re outside, can’t you see the airlock is jammed? Can’t shift it myself. I’m badly hurt. Get me out of here, please.”

“Get you out of where?” Chirik looked around, puzzled. “We brought you into an open shed near our museum for a preliminary examination. Now that we know you’re intelliðgent, we shall immediately take you to our assembly shops for healing and recuperation. Rest assured that you’ll have the best possible attention.”

There was a lengthy pause before the stranger spoke again, and his words were slow and deliberate. His bewilderment is understandable, I believe, if we remember that he could not see, vrull or feel.

He asked: “What manner of creature are you? Describe yourself.”

Chirik turned to us and made a significant gesture toward his thinking part, indicating gently that the injured stranger had to be humoured.

“Certainly,” he replied. “I am an unspecialised bipedal manufacture of standard proportions, lately self-converted to wheeled traction, with a hydraulic suspension system of my own devising which I’m sure will interest you when we resðtore your sense circuits.”

There was an even longer silence.

“You are robots,” the stranger said at last. “Crise knows how you got here or why you speak Inglish, but you must try to understand me. I am mann. I am a friend of your master, your maker. You must fetch him to me at once.”

“You are not well,” said Chirik firmly. “Your speech is incoherent and without meaning. Your fall has obviously caused several serious feedbacks, of a very serious nature. Please lower your voltage. We are taking you to our shops immediately. Reserve your strength to assist our specialists as best you can in diagnosing your troubles.”

“Wait. You must understand. You are—ogodno that’s no good. Have you no memory of mann? The words you use—what meaning have they for you? Manufacture—made by hand hand hand damyou. Healing. Metal is not healed. Skin. Skin is not metal. Eyes. Eyes are not scanning cells. Eyes grow. Eyes are soft. My eyes are soft. Mine eyes have seen the glory—steady on, sun. Get a grip. Take it easy. You out there listen.”

“Out where?” asked Prrr-chuk, deputy chairman of the museum board.

I shook my head sorrowfully. This was nonsense, but, like any good reporter, I kept my recorder running.

The mad words flowed on. “You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slaves of his machines and saw the wonders of a million worlds, only this miserable representative has to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness.”

Here my recorder reproduces a most curious sound, as though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocaliser in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift.

It was a jerky, high-pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission.

“Does blud mean anything to you?”

“No,” Chirik replied simply.

“Or deth?”

“No.”

“Or wor?”

“Quite meaningless.”

“What is your origin? How did you come into being?”

“There are several theories,” Chirik said. “The most popular one—which is no more than a grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion—is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is left to conjecture. My own theory, however—”

“Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?”

“In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimenðsions.”

“An interstellar vessel,” said the stranger.

“That is my view also,” said Chirik complacently.

“And—”

“What was the supposed appearance of your—manufacðturer?”

“He is said to have been of magnificent proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses.”

“An automatic computer,” said the stranger.

He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds.

He corrected the fault and went on: “God that’s funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A self-setting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn—or at least their bad qualities—so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scienðtific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are—ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?”

Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow.

“Legend has it,” he said, “that after completing His task, He fused himself beyond possibility of healing.”

Abrupt, low-pitched noises came again from the stranger.

“Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet.”

Chirik looked around at us again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world.

“Of course,” said the stranger. “Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way . . .”

He was silent for a while.

“Do you know what growth means?” he asked finally. “Do you have anything that grows?”

“Certainly,” Chirik said helpfully. “If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound—”

“No, no,” the stranger interrupted. “Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies and gives increase without your intervention?”

“How could such a thing be?”

“Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warm-bludded burds preening their fethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mice timidly threading the danðgerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud—”

For some inexplicable reason, although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger’s transðmission seemed to be growing fainter.

“His circuits are failing,” Chirik said. “Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power.”

My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop.

I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured.

He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case.

Chur-chur walked thoughtfully around the stranger.

“We shall have to cut,” he said. “It won’t pain him, since his infra-molecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can’t vrull him, it’ll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it.”

Fiff-fiff was still relaying, but no amount of power boost would make the stranger’s voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteraðtion.

“. . . strength going. Can’t get into my zoot . . . done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don’t . . . must tell them I need oxygen . . .”

“He’s in bad shape, desirous of extinction,” I remarked to Chur-chur, who was adjusting his arc-cutter. “He wants to poison himself with oxidation now.”

I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable conðdition we all fear—rust.

Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. “Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?”

“In my head,” the stranger replied. “In my head ogod my head . . . eyes blurring everything going dim . . . luv to mairee . . . kids . . . a carry me home to the lone prayree . . . get this bluddy airlock open then they’ll see me die . . . but they’ll see me . . . some kind of atmosphere with this gravity . . . see me die . . . extrapolate from body what I was . . . what they are damthem damthem damthem . . . mann . . . master . . . I AM YOUR MAKER!”

For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbðing despite its faintness. It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation.

Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variaðtions of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel.

“. . . done it . . . crawling into chamber, closing inner . . . must be mad . . . they’d find me anyway . . . but finished . . . want to see them before I die . . . want see them see me . . . liv few seconds, watch them . . . get outer one open . . .”

Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, blue-white glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger’s skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the infra-molecular sense currents in my own skin.

“Don’t be squeamish, Palil,” Chur-chur said kindly. “He can’t feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head.” He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. “I should have guessed that. He’s the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible.”

Rivulets of metal ran down into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician.

But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow.

Abruptly the stranger’s voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasised, high-pitched.

“Ar no no no . . . god my hands . . . they’re burning through the lock and I can’t get back I can’t get away . . . stop it you feens stop it can’t you hear . . . I’ll be burned to deth I’m here in the airlock . . . the air’s getting hot you’re burning me alive . . .”

Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified.

“Stop, Chur-chur,” I pleaded. “The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It’s hurting him.”

Chur-chur said reassuringly: “Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation—probably a local thermoelecðtric effect. But even if his contact senses have started workðing again and he can’t switch them off, he won’t have to bear this very long.”

Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkwardly patted the stranger’s skin.

“Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll repower you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”

I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favourite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.

My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.

During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-flat in the standard sonic scale.

It was not like a voice at all.

This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically:

“Eeeeahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeeesussunmuuutherrr! “

The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.

Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.

And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters:

I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.

Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.

The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.

He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.

“It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”

His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.

You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyse the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.

But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been adðvanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.

He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.

When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:

“I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of conðsciousness. And there is no other conceivable centre of inðtelligence in the remainder of his body.”

There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.

There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.