The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

THE OBSERVER

It existed. Whether it had slept and wakened, or been turned on, or if this might be the first instant of its creation, it had no way of knowing. There was no memory of other time, or place.

Words came to fit where it found itself. Words emerging out of nowhere, symbols quite unbidden – awakened or turned on or first appearing, as it had itself.

It was in a place of red and yellow. The land was red. The sky was yellow. A brightness stood straight above the red land in the yellow sky. Liquid ran gurgling down a channel in the land.

In a little time it knew more, had a better understanding. It knew the brightness was a sun. It knew the running liquid was a brook. It thought of the liquid as a compound, but it wasn’t water. Life forms sprang from the redness of the soil. Their stems were green. They had purple fruits at the top of them.

It had the names now, identifying symbols it could use – life, liquid, land, sky, red, yellow, purple, green, sun, bright, water. Each instant it had more words, more names, more terms. And it could see, although seeing might not be the proper term, for it had no eyes. Nor legs. Nor arms. Nor body.

It had no eyes and seemed to have no body, either. It had no idea of position – standing up or lying down or sitting. It could look anywhere it wished without turning its head, since it hadn’t any head. Although, strangely, it did seem to occupy a specific position in relation to the landscape.

It looked straight up into the sky at the brightness of the sun and could look directly at the brightness since it was seeing without eyes, without frail organic structures that might be harmed by brilliance.

The sun was a B8 star, five times more massive than the Sun, and it lay 3.76 A.U. distant from this planet.

Sun, capitalized? A.U.? Five? 3.76? Planet?

Sometime in the past – when past, where past, what past – it had known the terms, a sun that was capitalized, water that ran in brooks, the idea of a body and eyes. Or had it known them? Had it ever had a past in which it could have known them? Or were they simply terms that were being fed into it from another source, to be utilized as the need arose, tools – and there was yet another term – to be used in interpreting this place where it found itself? Interpreting this place for what? For itself? That was ridiculous, for it did not need to know, did not even care to know.

Knowing, how did it know? how did it know the sun was a B8 star, and what was a B8 star? How know its distance, its diameter, its mass just by looking at it? How know a star, for it had never seen a star before?

Then, even thinking this, it knew it had. It had known many suns, a long string of suns across the galaxy and it had looked at each of them and known its spectral type, its distance and diameter, its mass, its very composition, its age and probable length of remaining life, stable or variable, its spectral lines, any small peculiarities that might set it apart from other stars. Red giants, supergiants, white dwarfs, even one black dwarf. But mostly main sequence stars and the planets that went with them, for it made few stops at stars that had no planets.

Perhaps nothing had ever known more suns than it. Or knew more of suns than it.

And the purpose of all this? It tried to think of purpose, but there seemed no purpose. The purpose utterly escaped it. If there were, in fact, a purpose.

It stopped looking at the sun and looked at the rest of it, at all of it at once, at all the planetary surface in its sight – as if, it thought, it had eyes all around its nonexistent head. Why did it, it wondered, keep dwelling on this idea of a head and eyes? Had it, at one time perhaps, had a head and eyes? Was the ideal of head and eyes an old residual, perhaps a primitive, memory that persistently refused to go away, but that for some reason must linger and thrust itself forward at the slightest opportunity?

It tried to think it out, to reach back and grasp the idea or the memory and drag it squalling from its hole. And failed.

It concentrated on the surface. It was located – if located was the word – on a steep hillside with massive rock outcroppings. The hill shut off the view of one portion of the surface, but the rest lay bare before it to the horizon line.

The rest of the surface was level, except for one place, far distant, where what appeared to be a circular prominence arose. The top of the prominence was jagged and the sides were furrowed and it looked very like an ancient crater.

But the rest was level and through it ran several little streams of something that was liquid but was not water. The sparse vegetation stood up on its dark green stems, surmounted by its purple fruit and now it was apparent that there were several kinds of vegetation. The purple fruit vegetation at first had seemed to be the only vegetation because it was more abundant, and certainly more spectacular.

The soil seemed to be little more than sand. It put out a hand – no, not a hand, for it had no hand – but it thought of its action as putting out a hand. It put out a hand and thrust the fingers deep into the soil and the data on the soil came flowing into it. Sand. Almost pure sand. Silicon, some iron, some aluminum, traces of oxygen, hydrogen, potassium, magnesium. Almost no acidity. There were figures, percentages, but it hardly noticed. They simply passed along.

The atmosphere was deadly. Deadly to what? The radiation lancing in from the B-type star was deadly and again, deadly to what?

What do I have to know, it wondered. And there was another word it had not used before. I. Me. Myself. An entity. A self. A single thing, standing all alone, no part of another. A personality.

What am I? it asked. Where am I? And why? Why must I go on collecting all this data? What care I for soil, or radiation, or the atmosphere? Why should I have to know what kind of star is standing overhead? I have no body that can be affected by any of it. I seem to have no form. I only have a being. A disembodied entity. A nebulous I.

It desisted for a time, unmoving, doing nothing, collecting no more data, only looking at the red and yellow of the planet, the purple of the flowers.

Then, after a time, it took up its work again. It touched the rocky outcrops on the hillside, found the planes that lay between the layers, seeped into the rock, following the cleavages.

Limestone. Massive, hard limestone. Put down millennia ago at the bottom of the sea.

It paused for a moment, vaguely disturbed, then recognized the cause of its disturbance. Fossils!

Why should fossils disturb it, it asked itself and then suddenly it knew with something that amounted to excitement, or as close as it could come to what might be excitement. These were not the fossils of plants, primordial ancestors to those purple plants growing on the present surface. These were animals – well-organized forms of life, sophisticated in their structure, well up the evolutionary ladder.

So few of the other planets had any life at all, the few that did more often than not had only the simplest of vegetable life or, perhaps, tiny organisms on the borderline, things that might be slightly more than vegetable, but not yet animal. I should have known, it thought. The purple plants should have alerted me. For they are highly organized; they are not simple plants. On this planet, despite its deadly atmosphere and it deadly radiation and its liquid that is not water, evolutionary forces still had been at work.

It traced one particular fossil. Not large. A chitin covering, apparently, but still it had a skeleton of sorts. It had a head, a body, legs. It had a flattened tail for swimming in whatever evil chemical brew the ocean might have been. It had jaws for seizing and for holding. It had eyes, a great many more eyes, perhaps, than it had any need of. There were faint tracings of an alimentary canal, fragments of nerves here and there that were still preserved, or at least the canals in which they ran had been preserved.

And it thought of that faint, misty time when he –

He? First an I. And then a he.

Two identities – or rather two terms of identity.

No longer an it, but an I and he.

He lay thin and spread out along the tight seams of the limestone and knew the fossils and pondered on them. Especially that one particular fossil and that other misty time in which the first fossil had been found, the first time he had ever known there was such a thing as fossil. He recalled the finding of it and recalled its name as well. It had been called a trilobite. Someone had told him the name, but he could not remember who it might have been. A place so faint in time, so far in space, that all he had left of it was a fossil called a trilobite.

But there had been another time and another place and he was not new – he had not in that first instant of awareness been turned on, or newly hatched, or born. He had a history. There had been times of other awarenesses and he had held identity in those other times. Not new, he thought, but old. A creature with a past.

The thought of eyes, of body, or arms and legs – could all of them be memories from that other time or times? Could there have been a time when he did have a head and eyes, a body?

Or could he be mistaken? Could all of this be a phantom memory fashioned out of some happening, or event, or some combination of happenings and events that had occurred to some other being? Was it, perhaps, a misplaced memory, not of himself, but of something else? If the memory should prove to be his own, what had happened to him – what changes had been made?

He forgot the limestone and the fossils. He lay spread out in the fissures of the rock and stayed quiet and limp, hoping that out of the limpness and the quietness he might devise an answer. A partial answer came, an infuriating answer, unspecific and tantalizing. Not one place, but many; not one time, but many times. Not on one planet, but on many planets spaced over many light-years.

If all of this were true, he thought, there must be purpose in it. Otherwise, why the many planets and the data on those planets? And this was a new, unbidden thought – the data on the planets. Why the data? For what purpose was it gathered? Certainly not for himself, for he did not need the data, had no use for it. Could it be that he was only the gatherer, the harvester, the storer and communicator of the data that he gathered?

If not for himself, for whom? He waited for the answer to come welling up, for the memory to reassert itself, and in time he realized that he had gone groping back as far as he could go.

Slowly he withdrew from the rock, once more was upon the hillside above the red land beneath the yellow sky.

A portion of the nearby surface moved and as it moved, he saw that it was not a portion of the surface, but a creature that had a coloration which made it seem to be a part of the planet’s surface. It moved quickly, as if a shadow had brushed along and blurred the surface. It moved in short and flowing motions, and when it stopped its motion it became a part of the surface, blending into it.

It was watching him, he knew, looking him over, although what there was to see of him he could not imagine. Sensitive, perhaps, to another personality, to another thing that shared with it that strange and undefinable quality which made up life. A force field, he wondered – was that what he was, a disembodied intelligence carried in a force field?

He stayed still so the thing could look him over. It moved in its short, flowing dashes, all around him. It left a furrowed track behind it, it kicked up little spurts of sand as it made its dashes. It moved in closer.

And he had it. He held it motionless, wrapped up as if he held it in many hands. He examined it, not closely, not analytically, but only enough so he could tell what kind of thing it was. Protoplasmic and heavily shielded against the radiations, even designed, perhaps – although he could not be sure – to take advantage of the energy contained in the radiation. An organism, more than likely, that could not exist without the radiations, that needed them as other creatures might need warmth, or food, or oxygen. Intelligent and laced with a multitude of emotions – not, perhaps, the kind of intelligence that could build a complex culture, but a high level of animal intelligence. Perhaps still evolving in its intelligence. Give it a few more million years and it might contrive a culture.

He turned it loose. It flowed away, moving rapidly, straight away from him. He lost sight of it, but still could follow its movement for a time by its unreeling track and the spurts of sand it kicked into the air.

There was much work to do. an atmospheric profile, an analysis of the soil and of the micro-organisms that it might contain, a determination of the liquid in the brook, an examination of the plant life, a geological survey, measurement of the magnetic field, the intensity of the radiation. But first there should be a general survey of the planet to determine what sort of place it was, a pin-pointing of those areas that might be of economic interest.

And there it was again, another word he had not had before. Economic.

He searched inside himself, inside the theoretical intelligence enclosed within the hypothetical force field, for the purpose that was hinted in that single word. When he found it, it stood out sharp and clear – the one thing he had found that was sharp and clear. What was here that could be used and what would be the cost of obtaining it? A treasure hunt, he thought. That was the purpose of him. It was clear immediately that he, himself, had no use for treasure of any kind at all. There must be someone else who would have a use for it. Although when he thought of treasure a pleasurable thrill went through him.

What might there be in it for him, he wondered, this location of a treasure? What had been the profit to him in the finding of all those other treasures on all those other planets – although, come to think of it, there had not been treasure on every one of them. And on some of the others where there’d been, it had been meaningless, for planetary conditions had been such that it could not be got at. Many of the planets, he recalled, far too many of them, were such that only a thing such as himself would dare even to approach them.

There had been attempts, he remembered now, to recall him from some of the planets when it had become apparent they had no economic worth and that to further explore them would be a waste of time. He had resisted those attempts; he had ignored the summons to return to wherever it was he went when he did return. Because, in his simplistic ethic, when there was a job to do he did it and he did not quit until the job was done. Having started something, he was incapable of leaving off until it had been finished. It was a part of him, this single-minded stubbornness; it was a characteristic that was necessary to do the work he did.

If they had it one way, they could not have it two. He either was, or wasn’t. He did the job, or didn’t. He was so made that he had an interest in each problem that was presented him and would not leave off until he’d wrung the problem dry. They had to go along with that and they knew it now; they no longer bothered trying to recall him from a non-productive planet.

They? he asked himself, and remembered faintly other creatures such as he had been. They had indoctrinated him, they had made him what he was and they used him as they used the priceless planets he had found, but he did not mind the using, for it was a life and the only life he had. It either had been this life, or no life at all. He tried to recall circumstances, but something moved to block the recall. Exactly as he never could recall in all entirety, but only in fragments, the other planets he had visited. That, he thought at the time, might be a great mistake, for experience he had gathered on the other planets might have been valuable as guide lines on the one to which he currently had been sent. But for some reason, they did not allow it, but did their imperfect best to wipe from his memory all past experiences before he was sent out again. To keep him clear, they said; to guard him from confusion; to send a bright new mind, freed of all encumbrances, out to each new planet. That was why, he knew, he always arrived upon each planet groping for a meaning and purpose, with the feeling of being newly born to this particular planet and to nowhere else.

He did not mind. It still was a life and he saw a lot of places – very different places – and saw them, no matter what conditions might obtain, in perfect safety. For there was nothing that could touch him – tooth, or claw, or poison, no matter what the atmosphere, no matter what the radiation, there was nothing that could touch him. There was nothing of him to be touched. He walked – no, not walked, but moved – in utter nonchalance through all the hells the galaxy could muster.

A second sun was rising, a great swollen, brick-red star pushing its way above the horizon, with the first one just beginning to slide towards the west – as a matter of convenience, he thought of the big red one as rising in the east.

K2, he read it, thirty times, or so, the diameter of the Sun with a surface temperature that was possibly no more than 4,000 degrees. A binary system and maybe more than that; there might be other suns that he still had yet to see. He tried to calculate the distance, but that would not be possible with any accuracy until the giant had moved higher in the sky, until it had moved above the horizon that now bisected it.

But the second sun could wait, all the rest of it could wait. There was one thing he must see. He had not realized it before, but now he knew there was one thing about the landscape that had been nagging him. The crater did not fit. It had all the appearances of a crater, but it had no right to be there. It could not be volcanic, for it sat in the middle of a sandy terrain and the limestone thrusting from the hillside was sedimentary rock. There was no trace of igneous rock, no ancient lava flows. And the same objections still would hold if the crater had been formed by meteoric impact, for any meteorite that threw up a crater of that size would have turned tons of material into a molten mass and would have thrown out a sheet of magma, of which there was no sign.

He began drifting slowly in the direction of the crater. Beneath him the terrain remained unchanged – the red soil, the purple fruit and little else.

He came to rest – if that is what his action could be called – on the crater’s rim and for a moment failed to understand what he was seeing.

Some sort of shining substance extended all around the rim and sloped inward to the center to form what appeared to be a concave mirror. But it was not a mirror, for it was nonreflective.

Then, quite suddenly, an image formed upon it and if he could have caught his breath, he would have.

Two creatures, one large, the other smaller, stood on a ledge above a deep cut in the earth, with a striated sandstone bluff rising up above them. The smaller one was digging in the bluff with a hand tool of some sort – a hand tool that was grasped in what must be a hand, which was attached to an arm and the arm hooked up to a body, which had a head and eyes.

Myself, he thought – the smaller one, myself.

He felt a weakness and a haziness and the image in the mirror seemed to be trying to pull him down to join and coalesce with this image of himself. The gates of memory opened and the old, restricted data came pouring in upon him – the terms and relationships – and he cried out against it and tried to push it back, but it would not push back. It was as if someone were holding him so he could not get away and, with a mouth close against his ear, was telling him things he did not wish to know.

Humans, father, son, a railroad cut, the Earth, the finding of that first trilobite. Relentlessly the information came pouring into him, into the intellectual force field that he had become, that he had evolved into, or been engineered into, and that had been a comfort and a refuge until this very moment.

His father wore an old sweater, with holes in the elbows of the sleeves, and an old pair of black trousers that were baggy at the knees. He smoked an ancient pipe with a fire-charred bowl and a stem half-bitten through, and he watched with deep paternal interest as the boy, working carefully, dug out the tiny slab of stone that bore the imprint of an ancient form of life.

Then the image flickered and went out and he sat (?) upon the crater’s rim, with the dead mirror sweeping downward to its center, showing nothing but the red and blue reflections of the suns.

Now he knew, he thought. He knew, not what he was, but what he once had been – a creature that had walked upon two legs, that had a body and two arms, a head and eyes and a mouth that cried out in excited triumph at the finding of a trilobite. A creature that walked proudly and with misplaced confidence, for it had none of the immunity against its environment such as he now possessed.

From that feeble, vulnerable creature, how had he evolved?

Could it be death, he wondered, and was aghast at death, which was a new concept. Death, an ending, and there was no end, never would be one; a thing that was an intellect trapped within a force field could exist forever. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in the course of evolution, or of engineering, could death have played a part? Must a man come to death before he came to this?

He sat upon the crater’s rim and knew the surface of the planet all about him – the red of land, the yellow of the sky, the green and purple of the flowers, the gurgle of the liquid running in its courses, the red and blue of suns and the shadows that they cast, the running thing that threw up spurts of sand, the limestone and the fossils.

And something else as well and with the sensing of that something else a fear and panic he had never known before. Had never had the need to know, for he had been protected and immune, untouchable, secure, perhaps even in the center of a sun. There had been nothing that could get at him, no way he could be reached.

But that was true no longer, for now he could be reached. Something had torn from him an ancient memory and had shown it to him. Here, on this planet, there was a factor that could get at him, that could reach into him and tear from him something even he had not suspected.

He screamed a question and phantom echoes ran across the land, bouncing back to mock him. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Fainter and fainter and the only answers were the echoes.

It could afford not to answer him, he knew. It need not answer him. It could sit smug and silent while he screamed the question, waiting until it wished to strip other memories from him, memories for its own strange use, or to further mock him.

He was safe no longer. He was vulnerable. Naked to this thing that used a mirror to convince him of his own vulnerability.

He screamed again and this time the scream was directed to those others of his kind who had sent him out.

Take me back! I am naked! Save me!

Silence.

I have worked for you – I have dug out the data for you – I have done my job – You owe me something now!

Silence.

Please!

Silence.

Silence – and something more than silence. Not only silence, but an absence, a not being there, a vacuum.

The realization came thudding hard into his understanding. He had been abandoned, all ties with him had been cut – in the depth of unguessed space, he had been set adrift. They had washed their hands of him and he was not only naked, but alone.

They knew what had happened. They knew everything that ever happened to him, they monitored him continuously and would know everything he knew. And they had sensed the danger, perhaps even before he, himself, had sensed it. Had recognized the danger, not only to himself, but to themselves as well. If something could get to him, it could trace back the linkage and get to them as well. So the linkage had been cut and would not be restored. They weren’t taking any chances. It had been something that had been emphasized time and time again. You must remain not only unrecognized, but entirely unsuspected. You must do nothing that will make you known. You must never point a finger at us.

Cold, callous, indifferent. And frightened. More frightened, perhaps, than he was. For now they knew there was something in the galaxy that could become aware of the disembodied observer they had been sending out. They could never send another, if indeed they had another, for the old fear would be there. And perhaps an even greater fear – based upon the overriding suspicion that the linkage had been cut not quite soon enough, that this factor which had spotted their observer had already traced it back to them.

Fear for their bodies and their profits …

Not for their bodies, a voice said inside him. Not their biologic bodies. There are no longer any of your kind who have biologic bodies …

Then what? he asked.

An extension of their bodies, carrying on the purpose those with bodies gave them in a time when the bodies still existed. Carried on mindlessly ever since, but without a purpose, only with a memory of a purpose …

Who are you? he asked. How do you know all this? What will you do with me?

In a very different way, it said, I am one like you. You can be like me. You have your freedom now.

I have nothing, he said.

You have yourself, it said. Is that not enough?

But is self enough? he asked.

And did not need an answer.

For self was the basis of all life, all sentience. The institutions, the cultures, the economics were no more than structures for the enhancement of the self. Self now was all he had and self belonged to him. It was all he needed.

Thank you, sir, said he, the last human in the universe.