Later: Still no action. The servos remain immobile. J. can’t have exhausted its energy reserves, and yet I don’t detect the shadow of any kind of thought in it. Perhaps it really has given up and genuinely isn’t thinking of anything.
At any rate, the services to its personality banks haven’t ceased. I haven’t gone back into the deep freeze. At times, I rather wish I had…
Something is coming along the faintly luminous bottom of the tunnel. It’s quite small, smaller than the smallest of the servos, and it’s moving slowly and cautiously. Sometimes it speeds up a bit, into a momentary cautious scampering. I wonder where it came from. I wonder what it is.
I daren’t use my sense organs very much, but it seems that seven or eight more somethings are following the first one. I wish I could get a better look at them.
They almost seem alive, in a way that the servos, no matter how competent and busy, never are. There’s randomness in Jake, of course. It’s built in. A scrambler used to provide variety and change to our thought-lives But it was a mechanism, after all. It never gave the skyrocketing change, the vertiginous variety, of actual life. The somethings moving along the bottom of the tunnel move like living things.
I’ll risk it. I think—I hope—that Jake is too empty and exhausted to pay much heed to anything I do. But I’ve got to get a closer look at them.
Later: I’m glad I risked it. It would have been worth any risk. I never was more happy in my life.
Now I know that I’m capable of another emotion besides a loathing for humanity, a wan curiosity, and an even wanner wish to survive. What I feel now is love and never more intense and joyous, because what’s moving along the bottom of the tunnel is a group—a troop—I don’t know what one would properly call it—of raccoons. Raccoons. Black and gray, prick ears, seven-striped tails, burglar masks, skinny paws, beady eyes, and all. A delight of raccoons! My adorable striped-tailed darlings, it’s unbelievable how glad I am to see you! A delight of raccoons, alive and real, in the midst of Jake’s dreary madness and the etiolated, time-eroded personalities in Jake’s memory banks.
How had they managed to survive? Never mind, here they are. And if there are raccoons, may there not also be possums, whales, horned owls, jackals, toads? Perhaps the earth has somehow managed to clean herself from our human pollution.
The raccoons are beginning to scatter out, to investigate the chinks and fissures in J.’s threadbare vagina. They scamper into crevasses, they stand on their hind legs and pivot easily on their lush, soft, bushy behinds and look about in all directions. I suppose those mountains of sweetmeats and pastries attracted them; their liveliness makes it seem that the food either couldn’t be consumed or was unsubstantial. And now, in the immemorial manner of raccoons, they’re beginning to investigate.
Their clever little paws, almost as adroit as hands, are being run into cracks, are pulling out wires, rolls of tape, panels of miniaturized circuitry. I wonder what they make of it all. Meanwhile, they’re getting nearer to Jake’s center, the point where, if anywhere, Jake is vulnerable. And the servos don’t move; they seem not alerted by the animal invasion. Has Jake already “burned itself out” in its protracted search for the consummation of an impossible love? I doubt it. But why are the servos so indifferent?
Now the ring-tailed wonders begin their climbing. They could almost climb up a strictly vertical surface, and here, with the irregularities and soft spots in J.’s makeshift vagina to cling to, they can go very high. Up and up, pulling out and investigating whatever comes in their way. Fortunately, the voltages in J.’s interior are very low. Fortunately, for I shouldn’t want my darling Procyonlotor to get a shock. (Was I a naturalist, I wonder, when I was alive?) And the computer remains inert, under all this murmuration of raccoons.
I feel a very slight—shock? The animals keep on pulling. Festoons of tapes and wires are dripping from their paws. The servos are at last galvanized into action, though rather slow action, at that. They start toward the disembowelers in a swift crawl. But I feel perfectly confident of the raccoons’ ability to elude any servo pursuit.
The animals scamper a few feet farther and repeat their poking and pulling. I begin to feel rather odd, dim and remote.
Am I going back into the deep freeze? If I am, I know I’ll never come out. Jake is breaking down, and it’s the last time.
Never mind. It’s all right. This is a happy ending, because things are safe after all. The future is secure in nonhuman hands. Thank God, I mean not hands, but paws.
Book Information
The Best of MARGARET ST. CLAIR
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg
Academy Chicago Publishers
Copyright © Margaret St. Clair, 1967: “The Wine of Earth” © 1977: “Idris’ Pig”; “The Gardener”; “Child of Void”; “Hathor’s Pets”. © 1978: “The Pillows”; “The Listening Child”. © 1979: “Brightness Falls from the Air”; “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”. © 1980: “The Causes”; “An Egg A Month From All Over”. © 1981: “Prott”; “New Ritual”; “Wryneck Draw Me”. © 1982: “Brenda”; “Short in the Chest”. © 1984: “Horrer Howce”. Copyright © 1958 by Satellite Science Fiction: “The Invested Libido”; Copyright © 1960 by Galaxy: “The Nuse Man”. Copyright © 1961 by Galaxy: “An Old-fashioned Bird Christmas”.
Published in 1985 by Academy Chicago Publishers, 425 N. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60611
Copyright © 1985 by Margaret St. Clair
Printed and bound in the U.S.A.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
St. Clair, Margaret.
The best of Margaret St. Clair.
1. Science fiction, American. 2. Fantastic fiction, American. I. Greenberg, Martin Harry. II. Title.
PS3569.T118A6 1985 813’.54 85-18599
ISBN 0-89733-163-X
ISBN 0-89733-164-8 (pbk.)
$4.95
Cover design by Armen Kojoyian