Wolfbane

5

Citizen Germyn, as was his right by position and status as a connoisseur, helped prepare Citizen Boyne for his Donation. There was nothing much that needed to be done, actually. This made it an elaborate and lengthy task, according to the ethic of the Citizens; it had to be protracted, each step was surrounded by fullest dress of ritual.

It was done in the broad daylight of the new Sun, and as many of the three hundred citizens of Wheeling as could manage it were in the courtyard of the old Federal Building to watch.

The nature of the ceremony was this: A man who revealed himself Wolf, or who finally crumbled under the demands of life and ran amok, could not be allowed to live. He was haled before an audience of his equals and permitted—with the help of force, if that should be necessary, but preferably not—to make the Donation of Spinal Fluid. Execution was murder; and murder was not permitted under the gentle code of Citizens. So this was not execution. The draining of a man’s spinal fluid did not kill him. It only insured that, after a time and with much suffering, his internal chemistry would so arrange itself that he would die.

Once the Donation was made the problem was completely altered, of course; suffering was agreed to be a bad thing in itself. So, to save the Donor from the suffering that lay ahead, it was the custom to have the oldest and gentlest Citizen on hand stand by with a sharp-edged knife. When the Donation was complete, the Donor’s head was lopped off. It was done purely to avert suffering. Therefore that was not execution either, but only the hastening of an inevitable end. The dozen or so Citizens whose rank permitted them to assist then solemnly dissolved the spinal fluids in water and ceremoniously drank the potion down, at which time it was proper to offer a small poem in commentary. All in all, it was a perfectly splendid opportunity for the second purest form of meditation (other than those on connectivity) by everyone concerned.

Citizen Germyn, whose role was Catheter Bearer, took his place behind the Introducer Bearer, the Annunciators, and the Questioner of Purpose. As he passed Citizen Boyne, Germyn assisted him to assume the proper crouched-over position; Boyne: looked up gratefully and Germyn found the occasion proper for a Commendatory Half-Smile. The Questioner of Purpose said solemnly to Boyne:

“It is your privilege to make a Donation here today. Do you wish to do so?”

“I do,” said Boyne raptly. The anxiety had passed; clearly he was confident of making a good Donation; Germyn approved with all his eart.

The Annunciators, in alternate stanzas, announced the proper pause for meditation to the meager crowd, and all fell silent. Citizen Germyn began the process of blanking out his mind, to ready himself for the great opportunity to Appreciate that lay ahead. A sound distracted him; he glanced up irritably. It seemed to come from the House of the Five Regulations, a man’s voice, carrying. But no one else appeared to notice it. All of the watchers, all of those on the stone steps, were in somber meditation.

Germyn tried to return his thoughts to where they belonged. . . .

But something was troubling him. He had caught a glimpse of the Donor, and there had been something—something—

He angrily permitted himself to look up once more to see just what it had been about Citizen Boyne that had attracted his attention.

Yes, there was something. Over the form of Citizen Boyne, silent, barely visible, a flicker of life and motion. Nothing tangible. It was as if the air itself were in motion. ...

It was—Germyn thought with a bursting heart—it was an Eye!

The veritable miracle of Translation, it was about to take place here and now, upon the person of Citizen Boyne! And no one loiew it but himself!

In this last surmise Citizen Germyn was wrong.

True, no other human eyes saw the flawed-glass thing that twisted the air over Boyne’s prostrate body; but there was, in a sense, another witness some thousands of miles away.

The Pyramid on Mount Everest “stirred.”

It did not move; but something about it moved, or changed, or radiated. The Pyramid surveyed its—cabbage patch? Wrist-watch mine? It would make as much sense, it may be, to say wrist-watch patch or cabbage mine; at any rate; it surveyed what to it was a place where intricate mechanisms grew, ripened and were dug up at the moment of usefulness, whereupon they were quick-frozen and wired into circuits.

Through signals perceptible to it, the Pyramid had become “aware” that one of its mechanisms was now ready.

The Pyramid’s blood was dielectric fluid. Its limbs were electrostatic charges. Its philosophy was, Unscrew it and push. Its motive was survival.

Survival today was not what survival once had been, for a Pyramid. Once survival had merely been gliding along on a cushion of repellent charges, streaming electrons behind for the push, sending h-f pulses out often enough to get a picture of their bounced return integrated deep inside oneself.

If the picture showed something metabolizable, one metabolized it. One broke it down into molecules by lashing it with the surplus protons left over from the dispersed electrons; one absorbed the molecules. Sometimes the metabolizable object was an Immobile and sometimes a Mobile—a vague, theoretical, frivolous classification to a philosophy whose basis was that everything unscrewed. If it was a Mobile one sometimes had to move after it; that was the difference.

The essential was survival, not making idle distinctions.

However, the Pyramids had learned, quite a long time ago, that some distinctions were very useful to make. For example, there was the difference between things that were merely metabolizable and things which, very handily, were assimilable. Quite a lot of effort could be saved if things could simply be “wired” into the places where they were needed, intact.

Well, more or less intact.

This planet was rich in assimilable things. These things had proven well suited to being incorporated right into the functions of the Pyramids’ elaborate devices, with hardly any processing at all bar the suppression of unnecessary needs or desires.

It was for this reason that the Pyramids had bothered to steal the planet in the first place.

So the Pyramid on Mount Everest sat and waited.

It was not lonely in its isolation—no Pyramid had ever learned how to be “lonely.” For that matter, it was not really alone, either, since its directives came from the binary planet, with which—with all of which, fellow-Pyramids and self-acting devices and all—the Pyramid on Mount Everest was continuously in contact. It sent its h-f pulses bouncing and scattering out. It scattered them additionally on their return. Deep inside, the more-than-anamorphically distorted picture was reintegrated. Deeper inside still, it was interpreted and evaluated for its part in survival, in the sense that the Pyramids had come to understand survival.

“Survival” included the need for the complex components—a human being might have thought of them as “servomechanisms”—which could be assimilated, and which grew wild here.

The planet was, in fact, very rich in these components, and they had a useful habit of “ripening”—which is to say, of becoming perfect for the Pyramids’ use—on their own. This occurred, however, at irregular and unpredictable intervals. Therefore the Pyramid on Mount Everest was obliged to maintain a constant surveillance, planet wide, for the perfect moment of plucking.

(Of course, the components being harvested did not know they were ripening to be plucked. A wrist-watch on a jeweler’s shelf doesn’t know it is waiting for a shopper to buy it. The shopper has no interest in the previous state of the wrist-watch, either. So it was with the Pyramids and the useful devices they harvested on Earth.)

So when its surveillance showed a component was ripe, the Pyramid plucked it. It used electrostatic charges. When the charges formed about a component about to be plucked, they distorted the refractive index of the air. Human beings called this an “Eye.”

The Pyramid now found that a component was ripe for plucking.

A world away from Mount Everest, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Citizen Boyne had attained the rapture of total emptying of the mind. The electrostatic charges over his head swirled into an Eye.

There was a sound like the clapping of two hands, or a small thunder-crash.

The Citizens of Wheeling knew that sound well. It was the miniature thunderclap of air slapping together, as it filled the space that had been occupied by the kneeling, meditating form of Citizen Boyne, raptly awaiting his Donation of Fluid.

The three hundred Citizens of Wheeling were jerked out of their own meditations by the sound. They gasped in envy and admiration (and perhaps, a little, in fear) as they saw that Citizen Boyne had been Translated.

Or, put in a different context, that Citizen Boyne had become ripe and therefore was harvested.