Маргарет Сент-Клэр - The Best of Margaret St. Clair

one end it comes up against a blank wall of undisturbed personality storage banks. The other end of the long tunnel appears to be open to the air outside (if it still is air). The diameter of this horizontal shaft is about ten kilometers. These measurements are wholly approximate, of course. The surface of the tunnel is angular and rough, which is only reasonable considering what has been removed to make it.

The construction—but I am much less sure of this than I am of the removal—seems to be external. It’s a towering pylon, without the Gothicism of most of Jake’s architecture, probably a few kilometers longer than the interior tunnel and probably a little greater in diameter, with a roughly hexagonal tip. I believe it’s being constructed out of the memory banks that the servos previously removed from J.’s interior. Admirable economy! Waste not, want not. It contrasts strongly with J.’s profligacy when it was trying to win itself by its achievements as a cook.

The pylon-shaping process is still going on. The servos are using a good deal of force to make its elements cohere. The surface of the pylon appears to be, like that of the interior tunnel, angular and rough.

So far Jake has been using pre-existing parts of itself. Now a whole group of the servos—thirty at least—has withdrawn from the others and is waiting motionless. They aren’t silent, though. A continuous series of clucking noises, some soft and some loud, is coming from them. Are they making something? Time will tell. For the nonce, they have a quality that is both brooding and broody, a sort of cross between spiders and hens.

Later: The servos finally have begun to move around and around vertically over the surface of the interior tunnel, spirally and overlappingly, while they spray something on it out of openings on their sides I didn’t notice before. It’s a pinkish, spongy material that’s soupy and drippy at first but hardens to a deep cushion in a little while. Meanwhile, the external construction seems to have stopped.

The spraying of the interior tunnel goes on and on until the whole length of the tunnel is coated with it and all its roughnesses and angularities are erased.

The group of servos has moved on to the outside. Here, because of the gravity, it’s taking them considerably longer. But they seem to be spraying the exterior pylon with the same pinkish, fast -setting gunk they used on the inside.

Around and around and around, around and around and around. At last there comes a pause. The servos slip down the pylon and cluster around the opening of the horizontal internal tunnel. Another pause. Then a series of mighty creaks and groans begins, the shriek of metal on metal, a noise of unpliancy. It is coming, I think, from the towering, recently sprayed shaft.

The noises get louder and more grating. They’re concentrated at the base of the shaft. The smooth octahedral top of the pylon is moving. It’s bending lower and lower. It appears to be descending toward—Toward the external opening of the tunnel. Oh, God. For a moment I feel as disgusted with myself as I chronically am with humanity. How could I have been so stupid? For it’s plain that what Jake is trying to do now has been in the cards from the beginning, from the moment it conceived its idiotic passion for itself. The towering pinkish pylon, the long horizontal pink tunnel, for Jake’s last desperate attempts to consummate its love. Jake is going to try to diddle itself.

The servos have moved out of the way. The heavy pinkish shaft is almost horizontal now. It broaches the opening of the long, long tunnel. The tunnel seems to dilate the shaft enters it.

The pylon is moving rather slowly. But at last it reaches the end of the tunnel and crunches against the plastic-coated memory banks. Slowly it withdraws, almost to the opening of the tunnel. It comes back again, a little more rapidly. Soon all this part of the computer establishment is vibrating with the blows. How long will it go on?

Well, I suppose there are three possible ways in which this situation can resolve itself. If the plastic the servos sprayed on the shaft and tunnel was provided with something like nerve endings, endings that could carry messages to a pleasure center somewhere in Jake, both parts of Jake could achieve something like orgasm. Then the mighty blows of the superpenis would stop, at least temporarily.

If there’s no such pleasure center, and no nerve endings to carry messages to it, Jake could stop diddling itself eventually because the idiot perceived the futility of its attempt.

Or, finally, Jake can keep on with the working of the superpenis in the supervagina until something breaks. Those are all the possibilities I can think of.

Later (I don’t know how much later): It’s still going on. Jake has at least one advantage over the mammals it’s aping. Its superpenis is incapable of detumescence.

The copulatory, reciprocal motion goes on and on. On and on and on. And on.

I have been counting the number of strokes the pylon makes in the tunnel. If one figures one stroke per minute—a reasonable assumption, considering the length of the tunnel—and considers that there have been three thousand six hundred strokes since I began to count, then there have been at least sixty hours of continuous copulation. By now it’s plain, at least, that Jake must be deficient either in nerve endings in its self-created genitals, or in an adequate cerebral pleasure center where nerve messages could be received. The even tempo of the strokes has never varied, after the first initial speeding-up.

This has been going on too long.

Later: I lost count, stopped for a while, and then began to count again. I have got to 2,300 this time, but it seems that Jake is slowing down. The strokes are certainly coming more slowly.

Finally, the pylon withdraws completely from the horizontal female shaft. It seems sadly altered, shrunken, and bulging haphazardly. Has there been some sort of detumescence, after all?

No, that’s not it. The pylon is beginning to crumble. The plastic that held it together has been worn away, eroded, by the long-continued copulatory friction. Jake not only didn’t provide nerve endings for its genitals, it ignored the question of lubrication. The plastic that coated the pylon must have been of exceptionally high quality to have held the superpenis together for this long.

All activity has ceased. The servos seem frozen. I’m getting afraid, in the absence of any actions of its own, Jake may become aware of my sense organs, and infer from them that another individuality, besides its own messy conglomerateness, exists somewhere in it. I’ll have to be very careful. But I am genuinely curious as to what Jake will try next.

A better, more sensitive set of genitals, connected to a pleasure center somewhere in Jake? Actually, J’s center, as far as what used to be called a giant brain can be said to have one, is located not far from the end of its supervagina. It shouldn’t be much of a trick for the servos to install a pleasure-sensing mechanism there, and key it in with a simulation of vaginal nerve endings. That would be the obvious thing to attempt next, and Jake is nothing if not obvious. But it may be too convinced of that futility of its efforts to try again. Whatever it does, the computer remains ineluctably “it.”

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 --">