Clifford Simak - I Am Crying All Inside - And Other Stories

Wonder came to replace the thinking, a quiet, hard, chilling wonder that stretched out flat and thin. And the wonder asked: Is this afterlife? Is there really afterlife? Is this what happens when one dies? Hoping it was not, frantic it was not, despairing at the prospect of an eternal, groping afterlife, so flat and thin and dark. Wonder went on forever and forever—not thinking, not reasoning, not speculating, just a wonder that filled the little being that existed, a hopeless, helpless wonder that grew no less or greater, but stretched, unmarked, toward eternity.

Then the wonder went and the darkness went. There was light again and knowing, not only the knowing of the present, but of the past as well. As if something had snapped a switch or pushed a button. As if I’d been turned on.

I had been human once (and I knew what human was), but I was no longer. I knew it from the instant that unseen operator snapped the switch. It wasn’t hard to know. I hadn’t any head and my eyes were floating way up in the air and they were funny eyes. They didn’t look just one way; they looked all the way around and saw everything. Somewhere between my eyes and me were hearing and taste and smell and a lot of other senses I’d never had before—a heat sense, a magnetic indicator, a sniffer-out of life.

I sniffed out a lot of life—big life—and it was moving fast and I saw it was the lobsters, moving very fast to dive down into their burrows. They must have dived down like scared rabbits, for in an instant I lost all sense of them, the sense of them shielded out by many feet of ground. But to replace them was a great deal of other life, a thousand different kinds of life, perhaps more than a thousand different kinds of life and I knew that deep inside my brain all these different life forms—all the plants and grasses, all the insects (or this planet’s equivalent of insects), all the viruses and bacteria—were being filed away most neatly, to be pulled out and identified if there ever should be need.

My brain, I knew, was somewhere in my guts. It had to be, I knew, for I hadn’t any head. It was no proper place for a brain to be, but I had no more than thought that than I knew that it was the right place, down where it was protected and not sticking up into the air where anything or anyone at all could take a swipe at it.

I hadn’t any head and my brain was somewhere in the middle of me and my body was an oval, sort of like an egg, and it was armor-plated. Legs—I had a hundred legs, tiny things like caterpillar legs. I figured out, as well, that my eyes weren’t floating in the air, but were at the ends of two flexible stalks, which I guess you’d call antennae. And those antennae were more than just stalks to hold up my eyes. They were ears as well, more sensitive than my human ears had been, and taste and smell, heat sense, life sense, magnetic sense and other things which had not come clear as yet.

Just knowing all I had parked away in those two antennae gave me a queasy feeling, but there seemed really nothing bad about it, nothing that I couldn’t handle. With all the extra senses, I thought, I’d sure be hard to catch. Even feeling a little proud, perhaps, at how well equipped I was.

I saw that I was on a hilltop, the very hilltop I’d sat upon with the lobsters lapping up the booze. How long ago I might have been there, there was no way of knowing. The ashes of the fire were still there, the fire that they had kindled, proudly, with a fire-drill, and I had let them kindle it, never letting on that I could have lit the fire with a thumb-stroke on my lighter. Even managing, if I remembered rightly, to look a little envious at the ease with which they handled fire. The campfire was old, however, with the prints of pattering raindrops imprinted on the ash.

The ship was just across the valley and in a little while I’d go over to it and take off. I’d file my claim and make arrangements to put the planet on a paying basis. Everything was all right, except that I wasn’t human, and there upon that hilltop I began to miss my humanness. It’s a funny thing; you don’t ever stop to think what human is until you haven’t got it.

I was slightly scared, I suppose, at not being human; perhaps more than a little scared at all the junk I had that made me not be human. With a little effort I still could make myself feel human in my mind, although I knew damn well I wasn’t. And I got lonesome, just like that, for the spaceship squatting over there across the valley. Once I got inside it, I told myself, I would finally be safe.

But safe from what, I wondered. I had been dead, but now I wasn’t dead. It seemed to me I should be happy, but I couldn’t seem to be.

One of the lobsters stuck his head out of a burrow. I saw him and I heard him and I sensed his lifeness and his temperature. I thought that he would know.

“What is going on?” I asked him. “What has happened to me?”

“There was nothing else to do,” he told me. “We feel so sorry for you. There was so much wrong with you. We did the best we could, but you were so badly made.”

“Badly made!” I yelled and started for him and he went down the burrow so fast that even with all my sensory equipment I never saw him go.

Two things hit me hard.

I had talked to him and he’d answered and we’d understood each other and that night by the campfire we had barely passed the grunt-and-gesture stage.

And if I’d heard him right, it had been the lobsters that had put me back together, that had made me what I was. It was all insane, of course. How could those crummy lobsters do a thing like that? They lived in burrows and they used a fire-drill to build themselves a campfire and they didn’t even know how to make decent booze. It made no sense that a pack of lobsters living like a herd of woodchucks could have patched me back together.

But apparently they had; they were the only ones around. But if they had—and, again, they must have—they could have put me back into my former shape. It they were able to make me the kind of thing I was, they could have made me human. They must have used a lot of bio-engineering to fix me up at all, working with completely flexible culture tissues and a lot of other stuff of which I had no idea. If they had that kind of stuff to work with, the little creeps could have made me human.

I wondered if they’d played some sort of joke on me, and if, by God, they had, they would pay for it. When I got back I’d work their stupid tails off; I’d show them who was playing jokes.

They had dug me out and patched me up and I was still alive. There must not have been much left of me the way those boulders socked me. Perhaps they had no more than a hunk of brain to build on. It must have been a job to make anything of me. I suppose I should have been grateful to them, but I wasn’t able to work up much gratitude.

They had loused me up for sure. No matter how human I might feel or even act, to the eye I wasn’t human. Out in the galaxy I’d not be accepted as a human. By certain people, perhaps, and intellectually, but to most human beings I’d be nothing but a freak.

I’d get along, of course. With a planet such as this, one couldn’t help but get along. With the kind of bankroll I’d have I’d get along all right.

When I started for the ship I was afraid those caterpillar legs of mine might slow me down, but they didn’t. I went skimming along faster than I would have walked and over uneven ground I ordinarily would have walked around. I thought at first I might have to concentrate to make all those legs track in line, but I went along as if I’d been walking caterpillar-fashion all my life.

The eyes were something, too. I could see all around me and up into the sky as well. I realized that, as a primate, I had been looking down a tunnel, blind by more than half. And I realized, too, that as a primate I would have been confused and disoriented by this total vision, but as I was made it wasn’t. Not only my body had been changed, but my sensory centers as well.