Harlan Ellison: The Human Operators

[To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters”: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314) .]

Ship: the only place.

Ship says I’m to get wracked today at noon. And so I’m in grief already.

It seems unfair to have to get wracked three whole days ahead of the usual once-a-month. But I learned long ago not to ask Ship to explain anything personal.

I sense today is different; some things are happening. Early, I put on the spacesuit and go outside—which is not common. But a screen got badly scored by meteor dust; and I’m here, now, replacing it. Ship would say I’m being bad because: as I do my job, I sneak quick looks around me. I wouldn’t dare do it in the forbidden places, inside. I noticed when I was still a kid that Ship doesn’t seem to be so much aware of what I do when I’m outside.

And so I carefully sneak a few looks at the deep black space. And at the stars.

I once asked Ship why we never go toward those points of brilliance, those stars, as Ship calls them. For that question, I got a whole extra wracking, and a long, ranting lecture about how all those stars have humans living on their planets; and of how vicious humans are. Ship really blasted me that time, saying things I’d never heard before, like how Ship had gotten away from the vicious humans during the big war with the Kyben. And how, every once in a long while Ship has a “run-in” with the vicious humans but the detractor perimeter saves us. I don’t know what Ship means by all that; I don’t even know what a “run-in” is, exactly.

The last “run-in” must have been before I was big enough to remember. Or, at least, before Ship killed my father when I was fourteen. Several times, when he was still alive, I slept all day for no reason that I can think of. But since I’ve been doing all the maintenance work—since age fourteen—I sleep only my regular six-hour night. Ship tells me night and Ship tells me day, too.

I kneel here in my spacesuit, feeling tiny on this gray and curving metal place in the dark. Ship is big. Over five hundred feet long, and about a hundred and fifty feet thick at the widest back there. Again, I have that special out-here thought: suppose I just give myself a shove, and float right off toward one of those bright spots of light? Would I be able to get away? I think I would like that; there has to be someplace else than Ship.

As in the past, I slowly and sadly let go of the idea. Because if I try, and Ship catches me, I’ll really get wracked.

The repair job is finally done. I clomp back to the airlock, and use the spider to dilate it, and let myself be sucked back into what is, after all—I’ve got to admit it—a pretty secure place. All the gleaming corridors, the huge storerooms with their equipment and spare parts, and the freezer rooms with their stacks of food (enough, says Ship, to last one person for centuries), and the deck after deck of machinery that it’s my job to keep in repair. I can take pride in that. “Hurry! It is s ix minutes to noon!” Ship announces. I’m hurrying now.

I strip off my spacesuit and stick it to the decontamination board and head for the wracking room. At least, that’s what I call it. I suppose it’s really part of the engine room on Underdeck Ten, a special chamber fitted with electrical connections, most of which are testing instruments. I use them pretty regularly in my work. My father’s father’s father installed them for Ship, I think I recall.

There’s a big table, and I climb on top of it and lie down. The table is cold against the skin of my back and butt and thighs, but it warms me up as I lie here. It’s now one minute to noon. As I wait, shuddering with expectation, the ceiling lowers toward me. Part of what comes down fits over my head, and I feel the two hard knobs pressing into the temples of my skull. And cold; I feel the clamps coming down over my middle, my wrists, my ankles. A strap with metal in it tightens flexibly but firmly across my chest.

“Ready!” Ship commands. It always seems bitterly unfair. How can I ever be ready to be wracked? I hate it! Ship counts: “Ten…nine…eight…one!

The first jolt of electricity hits and everything tries to go in different directions; it feels like someone is tearing something soft inside me—that’s the way it feels.

Blackness swirls into my head and I forget everything. I am unconscious for a while. Just before I regain myself, before I am finished and Ship will permit me to go about my duties, I remember a thing I have remembered many times. This isn’t the first time for this memory. It is of my father and a thing he said once, not long before he was killed. “When Ship says vicious, Ship means smarter. There are ninety-eight other chances.”

He said those words very quickly. I think he knew he was going to get killed soon. Oh, of course, he must have known, my father must, because I was nearly fourteen then, and when he had become fourteen, Ship had killed his father, so he must have known.

And so the words are important. I know that; they are important; but I don’t know what they mean, not completely.

“You are finished!” Ship says.

I get off the table. The pain still hangs inside my head and I ask Ship, “Why am I wracked three days earlier than usual?”

Ship sounds angry. “I can wrack you again!”

But I know Ship won’t. Something new is going to happen and Ship wants me whole and alert for it. Once, when I asked Ship something personal, right after I was wracked, Ship did it again, and when I woke up Ship was worrying over me with the machines. Ship seemed concerned I might be damaged. Ever after that, Ship has not wracked me twice close together. So I ask, not really thinking I’ll get an answer: but I ask just the same.

“ There is a repairing I want you to do!”

Where, I ask. “ In the forbidden part below!”

I try not to smile. I knew there was a new thing going to happen and this is it. My father’s words come back again. Ninety-eight other chances.

Is this one of them?

I descend in the dark. There is no light in the dropshaft. Ship says I need no light. But I know the truth. Ship does not want me to be able to find my way back here again. This is the lowest I’ve ever been in Ship.

So I drop steadily, smoothly, swiftly, Now I come to a slowing place and slower and slower, and finally my feet touch the solid deck and I am here.

Light comes on. Very dimly. I move in the direction of the glow, and Ship is with me, all around me, of course. Ship is always with me, even when I sleep. Especially when I sleep.

The glow gets brighter as I round a curve in the corridor, and I see it is caused by a round panel that blocks the passage, touching the bulkheads on all sides, flattened at the bottom to fit the deckplates. It looks like glass, that glowing panel. I walk up to it and stop. There is no place else to go.

“ Step through the screen!” Ship says. I take a step toward the glowing panel but it doesn’t slide away into the bulkhead as so many other panels that don’t glow slide. I stop.

“Step through!” Ship tells me again. I put my hands out in front of me, palms forward, because I am afraid if I keep walking I will bang my nose against the glowing panel. But as my fingers touch the panel they seem to get soft, and I can see a light yellow glow through them, as if they are transparent. And my hands go through the panel and I can see them faintly, glowing yellow, on the other side. Then my naked forearms, then I’m right up against the panel, and my face goes through and everything is much lighter, more yellow, and I step onto the other side, in a forbidden place Ship has never allowed me to see.