Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

And then he could no longer speak at all. The emptied hearts of his kind, the remnants of all they had felt and thought and consumed, filled him to bursting and beyond. He held on until he felt something begin to tear at the center of everything and the pent energies rushed out into the unknown. He felt them all going then, even Holdfast whirling past like a leaf blown from a branch, like a bird flying suddenly with the wind instead of against it.

Farewell , he thought as his thoughts were stripped away and sent spinning down into the vortex after her. Farwell, dear Holdfast…!

And then she was gone, and Giant felt himself finally beginning to disappear, pulled to pieces, the pieces sucked into the same stream of rushing, exploding transfiguration.

Birds, vanishing…

The road…

… Not long enough…

… Dreams wandering the desolate moors…

The energies seemed self-sustaining now, the process of seeding a new universe safely underway, but Giant would never know for certain, any more than little Bashō could have known where his dreams would wander, and to whom. Big Giant, little Bashō – they were one and the same now, rushing down into the endless dark together. Would things begin again, as Holdfast had wished? If so, it would happen somewhere else, somewhere that even Giant could not imagine. After all, he had been given only the one universe and one short lifetime in which to study it.

Giant found he did not care. He had lived. He had thought, and those thoughts had created everything and nothing. In the end, he had learned at least one truth. Perhaps now something else would come after him, seeking truths of its own. Or perhaps not.

The universe’s last poem ended as Giant ended, spun into a mist of possibility at what might have been the end of all things, or another beginning.

(2013)

The ever-elusive Avram Davidson, author of several notoriously half-told novels, was born in 1923 in Yonkers, New York. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1942. served as a medic in the newly-formed Israeli armed forces in 1948, then worked for a while as a shepherd. He added science fiction to his roster of crime and mystery fiction in the mid-1950s, and in 1962 assumed the editorship of Fantasy & Science Fiction . From the mid-1960s to the end of his life, Davidson did not publish a single regular novel. His short stories, on the other hand – especially those collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters (1962) and The Redward Edward Papers (1978) – consolidated his reputation as a significant, if frustratingly scattergun talent.

The grey-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the grey-faced person to her husband.

"You think maybe he’s got something the matter?" she asked. "He walks kind of funny, to me."

"Walks like a golem ," Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

The old woman was nettled.

"Oh, I don’t know," she said. " I think he walks like your cousin Mendel."

The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The grey-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

"Man comes in without a hello, goodbye, or howareyou, sits himself down, and right away he’s at home… The chair is comfortable?" she asked. "Would you like maybe a glass of tea?"

She turned to her husband.

"Say something, Gumbeiner!" she demanded. "What are you, made of wood?"

The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

"Why should I say anything?" he asked the air. "Who am I? Nothing, that’s who."

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.

"When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror." He bared porcelain teeth.

"Never mind about my bones!" the old woman cried. "You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!"

"You will quake with fear," said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

"Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?"

"All mankind—" the stranger began.

" Shah! I’m talking to my husband… He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?"

"Probably a foreigner," Mr. Gumbeiner said complacently.

"You think so?" Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. "He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health."

"Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—"

Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.

"Gall bladder," the old man said. "Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night."

"I am not a human being!" the stranger said loudly.

"Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him."

" I am not a human being! "

"Ai, is that a son for you!" the old woman said, rocking her head. "A heart of gold, pure gold." She looked at the stranger. "All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?"

"On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired."

"Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred," the stranger said. "When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—"

"You said, you said already," Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

"In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart," the old woman intoned, "you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?"

"Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—"

"Listen, how educated he talks," Mr. Gumbeiner said admiringly. "Maybe he goes to the University here?"

"If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?" his wife suggested.

"Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?"

"Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card." She counted off on her fingers. "Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance— nu, Gumbeiner—"