The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 35

  “If you can’t help me,” I said, “I’ll have to leave.”

  He started at this, then scanned the typewriter’s keyboard intently, his eyes darting back and forth in his head. After a few seconds he pressed the proper keys to get him to speak: “Wait. I’ll lead you to the roof of the building. But you have to do something for me.”

  He took the typewriter out of his lap, and with that odd shuffling crawl, he moved himself over to another corner of the cage, where a stack of stained and rumpled notebooks with faded covers sat in a disordered pile. He grabbed up one of the notebooks in his hand and brandished it at me. Then he put it back in the pile, tapped out a few keys, and said, “These notebooks represent the complete treasury of my thought. Should you succeed in killing my father, you must get these papers published at a reputable academic press.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “Wait just a—”

  Tap-tap-tappeta-tap-ta-tap. “Oh yes—that’s the other thing. You’ll have to kill my father. How else do you expect to finish this? Perhaps the liquor will give you the nerve, if you managed to get more down your throat than you spilled over yourself. Pathetic.”

  FIFTEEN

  Tap-ta-ta-tap-tap. “I’ve been listening to the noises of this entire building for my whole life—though I’ve been imprisoned in this cage, I know the design of this place like my own hand. Most of the elevator shafts here stop before the building’s top floor. But there’s a service elevator accessible from this floor that opens onto the roof of the building—it’s the same one that Father has been using to transport the parts for the zeppelin. You’ll never find it without my help. You have a half hour left, maybe less—it’s certainly not enough time to climb fifty flights of stairs.”

  Caliban fidgeted, wiggling his fingers nervously over the keyboard. Then he jabbed a key and barked at me, “Don’t pause! Decide!” That startled me into action, and I unlocked the door to his cage, thinking that it would be best not to think about it. He pushed the pile of notebooks over to the door of the cage, and I gathered them into my arms, about twenty of them. Then with a surprising nimbleness he hopped out of the cage, gathering the cast-iron typewriter after him. He waddled out into the larger room with its tangle of tubes that led into the walls and presumably to almost every room of the Taligent Tower, placed his typewriter on the floor, sat down in front of it, pecked on a few keys, and said, “I won’t be able to speak again until we reach the service elevator—this typewriter is too heavy for me to carry with one hand while typing with the other.” Tap-tappeta. “So follow me carefully, and don’t get lost. I see that you have no reason to trust me, but you’ll have to trust me all the same. Once we reach the elevator, I’ll explain to you why I hate my father so much that it will be a pleasure for me to watch you kill him.”

  He picked up the typewriter and nodded at me, huddling over it as if he were a new mother and the typewriter were a baby that he needed to protect from the elements. I yanked open the last door that divided Caliban’s prison from the rest of the Tower, and we were off, down the endless corridors of doors with secret signs.

  SIXTEEN

  Ten minutes of jogging through twisting hallways brought Caliban and me to the enormous sliding gate of the Tower’s service elevator. I pushed the button to summon the elevator’s car, but it took a solid five minutes to descend from the roof to the 101st floor. Eventually the gate of the elevator slid open, and the two of us ran inside, me with Caliban’s notebooks, Caliban with his typewriter. The car’s floor had a thin covering of snow that was already half-melted, and Caliban brushed some of it out of the way with his hand as he sat down, placed the typewriter on his lap, and held his hands over the keys (and each of his fingers was a different color, shape, and length, with a scar circling its lower knuckle).

  I ran my fingers over the elevator’s panel, pressed the button labeled R, and the gate (slowly, very slowly) creaked shut and the car (slowly, very slowly, perhaps not fast enough) began to rise. Caliban began to speak then, in his rasping bass so ill-suited to his scrawny, frail body, typing out the arcane symbols as he told me the story of his life and the elevator car climbed (slowly) to the roof.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Look at how beautiful I am,” Caliban said, inviting me to gaze on his scars. “Look at how beautiful my Father made me. You have always thought of Prospero Taligent as the inventor of the mechanical man. But what most people don’t realize is that the initial stages of his research that led to the development of the mechanical man involved human cadavers, obtained from morgues by mostly legal means, though he wasn’t above taking delivery on a surreptitiously stolen corpse when he found it necessary. Duplicating the human body in a mechanical form has always been his true ambition, even if it meant forgoing the construction of machines more elaborate and more capable than mere imitators of humans could ever be. In order to accomplish this, he needed to have original models to work from, at his leisure.

  “He had next to no trouble developing mechanical equivalents for human hands, and eyes, and hearts. But a mechanical brain with the complexity and the volume of the human brain has always been beyond his reach. This is in part because the size of the smallest meaningful working part of the brain is much less than the smallest meaningful working part of an arm, for instance. A few cleverly attached rods can go a long way toward mimicking the actions of a human arm, but the same number of gears won’t come near duplicating the actions of the brain. I myself have suggested to Father that he might design a means of controlling electrical impulses in order to replicate the simple abilities of a mechanical calculator, as a beginning step toward miniaturizing the mechanical components that stuff the heads of his mechanical men, but controlling electricity in such a meticulous fashion seems to be either beyond his means or his ability to imagine. For all his genius, he has his blind sides and his shortsightedness. So the heads of his tin men are still crammed with the same devices that lie behind the face of a wristwatch, and even though their bodies have improved significantly with each successive design, their minds are still relatively basic, and will remain so into the foreseeable future.

  “But Father’s incapability to understand the potential of electricity to store and transfer information did not prevent him from attempting to make maps of the mind. It became possible for him to make these rudimentary maps when he deduced that, by delivering controlled electrical impulses directly into various parts of the brain, he could trigger simple emotional reactions in living subjects, such as the feeling of despair, or the perception of humor.

  “This gave him the idea of creating an optimally designed human being, not from mechanical parts, as he would later, but from the parts of cadavers. Each component would be the best possible specimen of its kind. It took him four years to secretly cull the parts from all the corpses. Look at how beautiful I am! One of my eyes is from a champion archer; the other is from a professional sharpshooter. My heart is from a marathon runner, as is one of my legs. My larynx is taken from the body of a world-class opera singer. One half of my brain is from a poet laureate; the other half is from a chess grandmaster. I can tell that you think me hideous, but pound for pound I have the most beautiful body in the world, if you forget about all the scars.

  “Father’s genius shows itself, however, in the addition of this typewriter, attached directly to my brain through this cable. Each one of the keys of this typewriter sends an electrical impulse directly to a corresponding area of my brain. I cannot speak or think without first pressing keys on this typewriter, but the trade-off for this is that I have complete control over the functioning of my own mind. Let me give you an example. You don’t really have a clear idea of exactly what it is in life that makes you laugh. One person could tell you a joke and have you doubled over in stitches, but another could tell the exact same joke with a different delivery and leave you mirthless. But if I press this key on my typewriter, the one with the picture of a grin, then I will instantly find you funny, and anything you say, whether yo
u intend it to be humorous or not, and the décor of this elevator car, and this typewriter, and my own appearance. And if I press this key, I will become sexually aroused, even though have no means of gratifying that arousal. This one, and I burst into tears. This one, and I get an urge to kill. This one, and I fall asleep. This one, and Jesus brings me the good news.

  “I spent the first few days of my existence repeatedly pressing this particular button here, whose symbol is worn off. It stimulates my pleasure center, and it turned me into a worthless beast. I stopped eating and sleeping, just so that I could press this key, thousands of times an hour, hour after hour. I came near an ecstatic death, but Father pointed out to me that there were higher pleasures than the simple ones, pleasures of the intellect that are granted to humans alone.

  “So I found that by pressing a series of keys in rapid succession, I could elicit more elaborate responses from my mind than those associated with the simplest emotions. I experimented with various combinations, and quickly left behind my obsession with base pleasures—I’d go so far as to say that I developed a strong distaste for them. My first major discovery came when I found a series of seven keys that, when pressed, would give me an inspirational stroke of genius. You, who have no real control over your own thinking, have to twiddle your thumbs and wait for what you call ‘inspiration,’ for some fictional muse or a series of fortunate accidents to give you one of your rare original ideas. But with these seven keys I can summon hunches at will that always work out, and intuitive leaps that would confound someone like yourself.

  “It was this discovery, of the thing inside our minds that causes genius, that made it possible for me to embark on my career as an intellectual. I pressed the genius keys almost as often as I pressed the pleasure button in the days after my inception. I filled the notebooks you have there with my ideas, which would take a person such as yourself, who has no ability to actively steer his mind in new directions of thinking, centuries to fathom.

  “Eventually, as it must to all enlightened people, it occurred to me to ask myself a question. If I could not think without pressing keys on this typewriter, then how did I have the initial thought that gave me a sense of self? How did I know such a simple thing as when the spatial boundary of my body ended and the rest of the world began? What was the thought that gave me the feeling of a presence of mind? If there was a single key on this typewriter that would cause me to be happy, and a short sequence of keys that allowed me to be a genius, then was there an even longer sequence of keys that would have encoded in it my own unique sense of identity? And if this was true, what would happen if I were to press those keys—would I not truly know myself, to an extent that no man had known himself before?

  “I asked Father about this during one of his visits to my cage, and he told me that after he constructed me, he gave me an electrical shock that gave my body life; then he typed a series of seventy-two keys on this typewriter that awoke my mind. Encrypted within those seventy-two keys was all that I was, he said; however, he refused to tell me what those keys were.

  “Of course, I immediately set out to discover them for myself, for I knew that they must contain the secret of my soul, that all enlightened men search for. And my resentment that my creator could possess this secret and have the cruelty to withhold it from me could not be measured.

  “Even with my ability to invoke strokes of genius at will, it took me a long time to solve that last great mystery. Along the way I made dozens of lesser discoveries in which I had little or no interest, but which I’m sure would have amazed someone like yourself: a series of twelve keys that allowed me to name the year in which an unidentified wine was bottled after tasting a sample; a series of eighteen keys that taught me how to tell the time without the help of a clock; a sequence of twenty-four keys that granted me perfect pitch; a sequence of thirty-six keys that gave me a limited low-level telepathy, so that I could sense the concealed emotions of nearby women, even if I could not read their thoughts. But that last discovery continued to elude me for months.

  “At last, after nearly exhausting my talents in what almost seemed to be a futile task, I deduced the series of seventy-two keys that symbolized my true name. And here is why I want you to kill my father: because after a day of meditation during which I cleared my mind of all other thoughts, when I finally typed that cursed series of symbols, I knew myself to the depths of my soul, and I lost all hope. Were I not such a weak man, I would have strangled my own throat before all the color and life burned out of me, so that I could have died still thinking that I was a brilliant mystery. But I wasn’t strong enough, and now instead of a beautiful creature, I look at myself and see only my scars.

  “Once I ceased to be a mystery to myself I became a thing of darkness. As long as you do not fully comprehend your own nature, you can pretend that you have a soul, and believe it, and believe yourself a miracle. But I have seen my soul for the simple thing that it is, and I tell you that there is nothing worse than knowing, truly knowing, that through and through you are nothing more than a machine.

  “This is why you have to kill my father, then: because he invented the mechanical man. I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.”

  A tiny, high-pitched bell rang softly then, and the service elevator’s gate slid open, revealing open air, and bitter cold, and flakes of flying snow, and the zeppelin Chrysalis.

  EIGHTEEN

  The zeppelin was moored to the roof of the tower, about two hundred yards from me. Standing in the elevator, I handed Caliban his notebooks and quickly ran both hands over all the floor call buttons. Then the two of us stepped outside, with Caliban waddling behind me with his typewriter in his arms and his notebooks stacked on top of it, pinned there with his chin. The elevator shut and began to descend, one floor at a time.

  Spotlights were mounted everywhere, shining through snow flurries and panning back and forth across the surfaces of the zeppelin, lighting up the Tower’s roof like morning. The zeppelin’s gasbag, an immense, cigar-shaped white balloon emblazoned with the Taligent Industries logo, was nearly full, and in the high winds of this height it strained against the dozens of steel cables that kept it lashed to the Tower, filling the air with a continuous rhythmic creak. Several thick black hoses were attached to the underside of the gasbag, each one leading to a huge gas tank decorated with the single letter H. The zeppelin’s gondola was slung snugly beneath the gasbag’s belly, its main door open, with a flight of movable stairs leading down from it to the roof of the Tower. Several mechanical men moved back and forth in lanky strides across the roof, carrying boxes of supplies onto the zeppelin. Consoles with monitors and banks of lights and crazily spinning dials were scattered over the roof, and bundles of multicolored wires led out of them, coiled on the roof in huge heavy loops, and snaked into various apertures of the zeppelin’s gondola.

  Huddled over one of the consoles with his back to me, intently examining its readouts, was someone who I thought might be familiar.

  But it took me a few moments to realize that, yes, this was him. The last time I had seen Prospero Taligent in person, I had been ten years old, and I remembered him as towering over me. After that I’d grown up with his images in newspapers, and I’d heard his voice on the radio, and I’d heard the tales, distorted by repetition, that others told about him. Most of these depictions disagreed violently about the makeup of his character, but there wasn’t a single one that didn’t make him seem larger than life.

  So I was surprised to see him in person, after all these intervening years, even a hundred yards away from me where I couldn’t make out his features, and see how small he was, the ordinary human size of him. It seemed to me that if I’d grown in stature during these past twenty years, then he should have as well. I should still have had to look up to see him.

  I didn’t think that it would take much longer for the gang of false mechanical men presumably led by Artegall to make its way to the roof—they’d had to climb the Towe
r’s stairs, but if they’d paced themselves so that they didn’t tire out, they’d be here any minute. Now that I was up against it, with the enormous zeppelin hanging over me which I had only seen from a distance earlier this evening, and with what I suppose was my nemesis standing just in front of me, I no longer felt the sense of youthful immortality that I had when I’d charged into the lobby of the Taligent Tower a few hours before. The booze I’d downed earlier had lost its effect, leaving me with nothing but the beginning of a headache and a numb metallic aftertaste in my mouth. I felt old, and ordinary. I felt glad that the next day was a holiday, because at the rate things were going, I would never be able to rescue Miranda and show up on time at the greeting-card works the following morning. Not to mention that Caliban (who was edging away from me, slowly, moving across the roof in a long arc that would lead him to the zeppelin’s gondola) seemed to expect me to murder Prospero in some sort of righteous rage, as if you can just call up strangers fresh off the street and ask them to commit patricide for you.

  In short, I was uncertain how this was all going to turn out. I wasn’t expecting anything nearly as dramatic as my own death—here alone on the roof with Prospero, Caliban, and a few mechanical men, my life didn’t seem to be at all in danger. I thought that the most likely outcome would be that I’d approach Prospero, and not remembering that I’d been his guest in this place twenty years before, he’d accuse me of being the crack-pot that I arguably was and have me forcibly escorted out after I’d said my piece.

  At any rate, I was sure that once the gang of vigilantes made its way to the roof, things would get more complicated, and it would be best to get this all over with before much longer. If I talked to Prospero and explained to him that his daughter had sent me what seemed like a rather desperate message summoning me here—well, that would have to be enough for me to be able to say to myself that I’d fulfilled my obligation to Miranda, even if nothing came of it.