Free Gray Matters by William Hjortsberg Page A

male and female, stand inert, relaxed. Their arms hang at their sides; their eyes are closed. The nostrils’ dilation and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest are the only indications of life.
    The discovery has deprived Itubi of his victory. What triumph he felt on escaping the subdistrict vanishes in the face of these sculpted fluid bodies. The Amco-pak, the vehicle of his salvation, now seems like a ponderous shell he is forced to carry. He squats inside, a wrinkled mollusc in his bath of sea water, a billion years of evolution separating him from these splendid creatures in the sunlit cylinders.
    Itubi knows that the low vaulted chamber is neither museum nor tomb. The bodies he sees are no pot-bellied slump-shouldered relics of the distant past, but erect well-muscled thoroughbreds, laboratory conceived and hatchery reared, genetically perfect, the chromosomes biochemically prearranged by a master of the art. Itubi recognizes the high cheekbones and coppery skin of the man encased in front of him. Once he had a similar body. It is a Tropique, one of the three humanoid life-forms created in the twenty-second century. The figure in the glowing glass case could easily be Itubi’s ghost.
    A bitter memory of the past stings at Obu Itubi’s consciousness. Again he is confronted by the specter of treachery and betrayal. The handsome male and female humanoids housed in this peculiar storage chamber recall happier times when the world was green and flowering, a cybernetic garden without disease or old age. Life had never known such abundance; mankind had reached an undreamed-of summit of culture and civilization. Peace and harmony pervaded the world. The inheritors of this Eden are on file in the multi-layered Depository beneath the plastic floor. Itubi stares out through the scanner, a stainless-steel crustacean peering at the form of God incarnate.
    His presence on the communicator comes like a shaft of sunlight into her dungeon, bringing hope and a glimpse of freedom. He promises seashells; a house built of driftwood and decorated with seashells. He can build such a house for he has many skills; his uniform is adorned with insignia attesting to his prowess. They will gather food from tide pools; he knows every edible species and how to prepare it. He is expert in the technique of survival. Even fire is no problem. He can start a fire with nothing more than a pair of sticks.
    How thrilled he is to learn she was once an actress. He wants to see all her films, but she makes him vow to screen only those made before she was fourteen. How terrifying for him to watch his true love age thirty years in the course of an afternoon’s entertainment: a lifetime distilled into a triple-feature. He is young and vulnerable, best for his dreams to remain untarnished. One thing she knows: the years between Vera at fourteen and Vera at forty-five are marred by considerable tarnish.
    Itubi nurtures his rage, letting it thrive and blossom, cultivating a red flowering anger that is exquisite and all-consuming. Confronted by the body stolen from him a hundred years before, the memories of that final flight to Abyssinia with his family and friends burn with renewed fervor. He remembers the choking dismay he felt on the Awakening, the day the World Council voted for universal cerebrectomy as a necessary evolutionary advance in mankind’s quest for spiritual knowledge. Itubi, who had always looked to his art for salvation, ignored the epidemic of religious fervor gripping the world and failed to report to the Surgical Center, spending the next five years hiding in mountain caves and dugouts until the robot Sentinels discovered him close to death near a poisoned waterhole. He regained consciousness in the sub-district, on the lowest level of the System.
    The perfection of the Tropique seems to mock the agony of what was lost in that fateful operation. They stole more than his life and body; the world ended on that day, a world so fine