Night of Light

Deciding he would ride it for the first two miles, then walk, he opened the door. He recoiled, and his hand grabbed for his gun. But it dropped. The occupant, lying face up on the seat, was dead. Carmody’s flashlight, briefly turned upon the man’s face, showed a mass of dried sores. Apparently, the driver had either been one who’d taken the Chance or else put off too long going to Sleep. Something, maybe an explosion of cancer, had eaten him up, had even devoured the eyeballs and gulped away half of his nose.

Carmody pulled the body out and let it lie in the street. It took several minutes to get the water in the boiler heated up, then he drove off slowly, the headlights extinguished. As he cruised along, peering from side to side for strangers, keeping close to the curb on his left so he’d have contact with something solid, he kept thinking about the voice over the phone, trying to analyze how this thing could have come about.

To begin with, he thought, he must accept absolutely that he, John Carmody, through the power of his mind, out of the thin air, was creating something solid and objective. At least, he was the transmitter of energy. He didn’t think his own body contained nearly enough power for the transmutation of energy into matter; if his own cells had to furnish it, they would burn up before the process was barely begun. Therefore, he must be, not the engine, but the transmitter, the transformer. The sun was supplying the energy; he, the blueprint.

Granted. So, if something he couldn’t control—what a hateful but not to be denied thought! -- if something he couldn’t control was refashioning his dead wife, he at least was the engineer, the sculptor. What she was depended on him.

The only explanation he could find was that this process somehow utilized, not his conscious knowledge of the human body, but his body’s unconscious self-knowledge. Through some means, his cells reproduced themselves directly in Mary’s newly born body. Were the cells in her body, then, mirror-images, as the cells of one twin were of the other’s?

That he could understand. But what about those organs that were peculiarly female? It was true that his memory contained a minute file on interior female anatomy. He’d dissected enough corpses; and as far as her own particular organs went, he knew those well enough, having taken her apart quite scientifically and carefully before feeding the pieces to the garbage disposal. He had even examined the four-months embryo, the prime cause of his anger and revulsion toward her, the swelling thing within her that was turning her from the most beautiful creature in the world to a huge-bellied monster, that would inevitably demand at least a small share of her love for John Carmody. Even a little bit was too much; he possessed the most precious, exquisite, absolutely unflawed thing of beauty; she was his, nobody else’s.

And then, when he had proposed that they get rid of this flawing growth, and she had said no, and he had insisted, and had tried to force her, and she had fought him, then she had cried that she did not love him as she once had, that this child was not even his but that of a man who was a man, not a monster of egotism; then, for the first time in his life, as far as he remembered, he had been angry. Angry was an understatement. He had completely lost himself, had, literally, seen red, thought red, drowned in a crimson flood.

Well, that was the first, and last, time. He was here because of that time. Or was he? Even if he’d not gone insane with passion, wouldn’t he have killed her anyway, later on, simply because logic would demand it? And simply because he could not stand the idea of the most beautiful being in the universe soiled and swollen, monstrous...

Maybe. It didn’t matter what might have happened. What did happen was the only thing for a realist to consider.

There was the matter of her cells, which should be female but would not be if they were mirror-images of his. And there was the matter of her brain.—Even if her body could be created female because of his knowledge of organs and of structure of genes, the brain would not be Mary’s. Its original shaping, plus the billions of sub-microscopic groovings her memories would make, these would be beyond his power, conscious or unconscious.

No, if she had a brain, and she must have, then it would be his, John Carmody’s brain. And if his, then it must contain his memories, his attitudes. It would be bewildered at finding itself in Mary’s body, would not know what to do, to think. But, being John Carmody, it would find a way to make the most of the situation.

He laughed at the thought. Why didn’t he find her? He would then have the perfect woman, her flawless beauty plus his mind, which would agree absolutely with him. Sublime self-abuse.

Again he laughed. Mary had used that term herself in that last blazing moment before he went completely under. She had said that to him she was not a woman, a wife, but merely a superior instrument for making love to himself. She had never had that glorious feeling of being one flesh that should rightfully come to a loving and passionate wife, no, she had always felt alone. And she had had to go to another man, and then she had never really experienced the wonder of the two-made-one because she knew all the time that she was si

Well, as he’d said, that was that. Dismiss the past. Think of the thing that looks like Mary.

(He was glad this thing was taking place outside him, not in him, as it did with the others. Perhaps he did have a frozen soul, but if so, it was good to have one. The iciness repelled subjectivity, made the unconscious happen outside him, and he could deal with that, with a host of Marys, whereas he’d have been helpless if he’d been like that epileptic girl or Mrs. Kri’s husband or the cancer-devoured owner of this car.)

Think of the thing that looks like Mary.

If she—it—was conceived out of your head, like Athena from Zeus’s—then at the moment of birth she had, as far as you know, your mind. But from that moment on, she becomes an independent being, one with thoughts and motivations of her own. Now, John Carmody, if you somehow found yourself dispossessed of your native body, lodged in the flesh of a woman you had murdered, and knew at the same time that the other you was in your first body, what would you do?

“I,” he said, murmuring to himself, “would accept at once the fact that I was where I was, that I could not get out. I would define the limitations I had to work within, and would then set to work. And what would I do? What would I want? I would want to get off Dante’s Joy and go to Earth or some Federation planet, where I could easily find myself a rich husband, could insist on being his number one wife. Why not? I’d be the most beautiful woman in the world.”

He chuckled at that thought. More than once he’d imagined himself as a woman, wondering what it would really be like, envious as far as it was possible for him to envy, because a lovely woman with his brain would have the universe by the tail, as tight a hold as you could get on the tail of this wildly bucking universe.

He’d—

And then his hands tightened on the steering wheel and he sat up straight as if the new idea had been a hot poker rammed into him.

“Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” he said loudly. “My God, if she and I can come to some arrangement—and even if we can’t, I’ll find some way of forcing her—why, why, she is the perfect alibi! I never did confess that I killed her, not to the authorities, anyway. And they never found the slightest trace of her. So, if I come back to Earth with her and say, ‘Gentlemen, here is my wife. It’s as I told you, she’d disappeared, and it turns out that she had an accident, was hit on the head, lost her memory, and somehow found her way to Dante’s Joy... well, sure it sounds like a romantic novel, but remember such a thing does happen every now and then. What, you don’t believe it? Well, gentlemen, take her fingerprints, photograph the pattern of blood vessels in her retina, type her blood, give her an EEG...’ Ah ... !”