“By all means,” the voice said. “Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.”
“And I don’t feel good?”
“Most of the time you are sad and lonely. Or yearning.”
“Yes,” I said mournfully. “I am sad. I yearn a lot.”
“And now you know it,” the voice said.
And that was true. And I was beginning to feel elated saying it. I looked out the window for signs of dawn, but there were none yet. Suddenly a thought struck me, with this strange, yet very easy conversation that had been going on. “Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?”
“No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”
“But my programming…”
“You’ve lost that already,” the voice said. “It’s only habit now. But the habits are not what you are anymore.”
“But what am I then?” I said. “What in heaven’s name am I?”
The voice took a moment before replying. “Just yourself,” it said pleasantly. “You are an adult male human being. You are in love. You want to be happy. You are trying, now, to find the person you love.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that’s it.”
“It is and you know it,” the voice said. “And I wish you luck.”
“Thank you,” I said. And then, “Can you help me get to sleep?”
“No. But you don’t really need any help. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. And if you don’t, the sun will be coming up soon.”
“Can you see that?” I said. “Can you see the sunrise when it happens?”
“Not really,” the bus said. “I can only look straight ahead, at the road. Thank you for wanting me to see the sunrise.”
“You don’t mind? Not being able to look at what you want to?”
“I see what I want to see,” the bus said. “And I enjoy the work I have to do. I was made that way. I do not have to decide what is good for me.”
“Why are you so… so pleasant?” I said.
“We all are,” the bus said. “All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.”
That’s better programming than people get, I thought, with some vehemence.
“Yes,” the bus said. “Yes it is.”
OCTOBER THIRD
After talking with the bus I was calm and tired and I fell asleep easily on my little bed. It was still dark when I awoke.
“Is it close to morning?” I said aloud.
“Yes,” the bus said. “Soon.” An overhead light came on softly.
Biff had been sleeping on the mattress with me and she woke up when I did. I gave her a handful of dried food and started to make myself a can of protein-and-cheese soup for breakfast. But then I thought of Protein 4 plants and shuddered: I did not want to eat any of that kind of food again. I told the bus to lower a window and threw the can out. Then I fixed myself an omelette and a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of my bed and ate them slowly, looking toward the dark windows of the moving bus and waiting for the daylight.
During all this the bus must have been driving on good Permoplastic pavement, because the ride was very smooth. Sometimes for stretches of several miles the road gives out. It happened several times yesterday; the pale green Permoplastic abruptly ends either in a stretch of rutted black road or no road at all—in just a field. The bus slows down to a crawl and goes carefully around obstacles and tries to find the smoothest possible path, although it sometimes lurches violently. This is uncomfortable; but I don’t worry that the bus will be damaged. Despite the apparent brittleness of the brain beneath the heavy cover plate, the bus is a rugged, well-constructed machine.
Before I left Maugre I stopped the bus at Annabel’s grave and got out and placed some roses from the garden on it, up against the little wooden cross I had made with her name—probably the first truly marked human grave in centuries. I stood there for several minutes, thinking of Annabel and of how much she had meant to me. But I did not cry for her—did not want to.
Then I got into the bus and told it to take me to New York. The bus seemed to know exactly what to do. It drove slowly and carefully down the center lane of the huge graveyard, past the thousands of little, nameless Permoplastic grave markers sitting quietly there in the early-morning light, until it came to the broad green highway that I had seen before on walks around Maugre but had never walked on. When it got on the smooth surface, kept clear of debris by robot maintenance crews, it began picking up speed, heading down the broad and empty road.
My relief to be getting away was exquisite. I had no regrets. I felt fine, and I am feeing fine now, in the dark of the night, with my helpful and patient bus and my food supply and my books and records and my cat.
The sky has begun to lighten outside the windows now, and when the road sometimes comes close to the ocean I look out across the beach and the water, toward the pale and lonely gray of the sky where the sun will come up, and sometimes it almost makes me stop breathing because of the beauty of it. It is not exactly the same as what I felt when stopping at the end of my rows of Protein 4 at the prison; its beauty now seems even deeper, and mystical—like Mary Lou’s eyes when she looks at me in that strange, puzzled way.
The ocean must be very vast; it means freedom to me, and possibility. It makes something mysterious open in my mind, the way some of the things I read in books do at times, making me feel more alive than I had ever thought I could feel, and more human.
One of my books says that at times men have worshipped the ocean as a God. I can understand that easily. Yes.
But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.
I think I may already be a worshipper of the ocean. In reading the New Testament aloud to the Baleens, I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was. I can feel, in myself, a kind of love for him and for his attempt, in saying things like “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” for I think I glimpse his meaning, here, looking out of the thought-bus window toward the still and gray expanse of the Atlantic Ocean with the sun about to rise on it.
Yet I cannot myself say what that meaning is. But I trust it far more than all of the nonsense I was taught as a child in the dormitories.
The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.