Harlan Ellison: The Human Operators

I hear voices. They are all the same voice, but they are talking to one another in a soft, running-together way; the way I sound when I am just talking to myself sometimes in my cubicle with my cot in it.

I decide to listen to what the voices are saying, but not to ask Ship about them, because I think it is Ship talking to itself, down here in this lonely place. I will think about what Ship is saying later, when I don’t have to make repairs and act the way Ship wants me to act. What Ship is saying to itself is interesting.

This place does not look like other repair places I know in Ship. It is filled with so many great round glass balls on pedestals, each giving off its yellow light in pulses, that I cannot count them. There are rows and rows of clear glass balls, and inside them I see metal…and other things, soft things, all together. And the wires spark gently, and the soft things move, and the yellow light pulses. I think these glass balls are what are talking. But I don’t know if that’s so. I only think it is.

Two of the glass balls are dark. Their pedestals look chalky, not shining white like all the others. Inside the two dark balls, there are black things, like burned-out wires. The soft things don’t move.

“Replace the overloaded modules!” Ship says.

I know Ship means the dark globes. So I go over to them and I look at them and after a while I say, yes, I can repair these, and Ship says it knows I can, and to get to it quickly. Ship is hurrying me; something is going to happen. I wonder what it will be?

I find replacement globes in a dilation chamber, and I take the sacs off them and do what has to be done to make the soft things move and the wires spark, and I listen very carefully to the voices whispering and warming each other with words as Ship talks to itself, and I hear a great many things that don’t mean anything to me, because they are speaking about things that happened before I was born, and about parts of Ship I’ve never seen. But I hear a great many things that I do understand, and I know Ship would never let me hear these things if it wasn’t absolutely necessary for me to be here repairing the globes. I remember all these things.

Particularly the part where Ship is crying.

When I have the globes repaired and now all of them are sparking and pulsing and moving, Ship asks me, “ Is the intermind total again!”

So I say yes it is, and Ship says get upshaft, and I go soft through that glowing panel and I’m back in the passage. I go back to the dropshaft and go up, and Ship tells me, “Go to your cubicle and make yourself clean!”

I do it, and decide to wear a clothes, but Ship says be naked, and then says, “You are going to meet a female!” Ship has never said that before. I have never seen a female.

It is because of the female that Ship sent me down to the forbidden place with the glowing yellow globes, the place where the intermind lives. And it is because of the female that I am waiting in the dome chamber linked to the airlock. I am waiting for the female to come across from—I will have to understand this —another ship. Not Ship, the Ship I know, but some other ship with which Ship has been in communication. I did not know there were other ships.

I had to go down to the place of the intermind, to repair it, so Ship could let this other ship get close without being destroyed by the defractor perimeter. Ship has not told me this; I overheard it in the intermind place, the voices talking to one another. The voices said, “His father was vicious!”

I know what that means. My father told me when Ship says vicious, Ship means smarter. Are there ninety-eight other ships? Are those the ninety-eight other chances? I hope that’s the answer, because many things are happening all at once, and my time may be near at hand. My father did it, broke the globe mechanism that allowed Ship to turn off the defractor perimeter, so other ships could get close. He did it many years ago, and Ship did without it for all those years rather than trust me to go to the intermind, to overhear all that I’ve heard. But now Ship needs to turn off the perimeter so the other ship can send the female across. Ship and the other ship have been in communication. The human operator on the other ship is a female, my age. She is going to be put aboard Ship and we are to produce one and, maybe later on, another human child. I know what that means. When the child reaches fourteen, I will be killed.

The intermind said while she’s “carrying” a human child, the female does not get wracked by her ship. If things do not come my way, perhaps I will ask Ship if I can “carry” the human child; then I won’t be wracked at all. And I have found out why I was wracked three days ahead of time: the female’s period—whatever that is; I don’t think I have one of those—ended last night. Ship has talked to the other ship and the thing they don’t seem to know is what the “fertile time” is. I don’t know, either, otherwise I would try and use that information. But all it seems to mean is that the female will be put aboard Ship every day till she gets another “period.”

It will be nice to talk to someone besides Ship. I hear the high sound of something screaming for a long drawn-out time and I ask Ship what it is. Ship tells me it is the defractor perimeter dissolving so the other ship can put the female across.

I don’t have time to think about the voices now.

When she comes through the inner lock she is without a clothes like me. Her first words to me are, “Starfighter Eighty-eight says to tell you I am very happy to be here; I am the human operator of Starfighter Eighty-eight and I am very pleased to meet you.”

She is not as tall as me. I come up to the line of fourth and fifth bulkhead plates. Her eyes are very dark, I think brown, but perhaps they are black. She has dark under her eyes and her cheeks are not full. Her arms and legs are much thinner than mine. She has much longer hair than mine, it comes down her back and it is that dark brown like her eyes. Yes, now I decide her eyes are brown, not black. She has hair between her legs like me but she does not have a penis or scrotum sac. She has larger breasts than me, with very large nipples that stand out, and dark brown slightly-flattened circles around them. There are other differences between us: her fingers are thinner than mine, and longer, and aside from the hair on her head that hangs so long, and the hair between her legs and in her armpits, she has no other hair on her body. Or if she does, it is very fine and pale and I can’t see it.

Then I suddenly realize what she has said. So that’s what the words dimming on the hull of Ship mean. It is a name. Ship is called Starfighter 31 and the female human operator lives in Starfighter 88.

There are ninety-eight other chances. Yes.

Now, as if she is reading my thoughts, trying to answer questions I haven’t yet asked, she says, “Starfighter Eighty-eight has told me to tell you that I am vicious, that I get more vicious every day…” and it answers the thought I have just had—with the memory of my father’s frightened face in the days before he was killed—of my father saying, When Ship says vicious, Ship means smarter.

I know! I suppose I have always known, because I have always wanted to leave Ship and go to those brilliant lights that are stars. But I now make the hook-up. Human operators grow more vicious as they grow older. Older, more vicious: vicious means smarter: smarter means more dangerous to Ship. But how? That is why my father had to die when I was fourteen and able to repair Ship. That is why this female has been put on board Ship. To carry a human child so it will grow to be fourteen years old and Ship can kill me before I get too old, too vicious, too smart, too dangerous to Ship. Does this female know how? If only I could ask her without Ship hearing me. But that is impossible. Ship is always with me, even when I am sleeping.