The Deep One, Neil P. Ruzic [ready to read books .TXT] 📗

in the now," Mecmother began. "Do you understand that?"

"Y-yes, I understand. You are—planned—fixed before."

"That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of choices and actions, but we are not infinite."

"Infinite?"

"We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real—like you—a long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you—and one other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you don't hurt each other."

"But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!"

"Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the first sign of trouble."

"How do you know? How can you talk if you aren't real?"

"What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another time. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things—to understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable thing."

"You mean because I'm not like the others?"

"You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes, but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of this ship is Destiny. Do you know why?"

"Yes—I know."

"Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each other to live on New Earth—eleven years from now."

He thought sullenly, how can I play with them when they're flat? But he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way. Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother should be warm and loving.

Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the science lesson could start.

He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly browned from invisible light. They followed Adam without question, but seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit—the loose-fitting robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the classwork.

During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace, Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other children—deep?"

"Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to you. Why are you confused? It's us, the mecs, who are flat. The other children are healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were born were selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the finest the human race could produce—intelligent, strong, healthy, high survival quotient. Is this what you mean by deep?"

"Partly, but also—feeling. I think I feel things better."

The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at Mecteacher in the central panel.

Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds and the way the moons circled the planets—all of them condensed into spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony.

He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it sphere?"

"I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A sphere is an apple or an orange—"

Mecteacher detected a covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or hear. "Do not think this is because she is not—deep, Adam. She is only seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we mecs are pre-set?"

"Yes."

"In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the beginning."

Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple.

Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon.

"That's an interesting question, Eve. But we are still too many millions of miles away to know yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know."

In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his—with one exception.

He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired of free-falling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship.

On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They had to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong.

It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off.

The stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big—bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star.

Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others—

The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were—flat, undeep.

For years, he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him.

They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive.

He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it.

And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals—or would I?

He pondered the question for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven—perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested—but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation.