The State of the Art(20)

respectable, if a little patchy.Hairs fall out, and I

have to squirm and pull to get an arm into the body

of the suit to poke the hairs into the waste unit each

night, or they itch.I am woken up at night by the

pain inside me.It is like a little life itself, pawing

and scraping to get out.

Sometimes I dream a lot, sometimes not at all.I

have given up singing.The land goes on.I had

forgotten planets were so big. This one's smaller than standard, and it still seems to go on and on

without end.I feel very cold, and the stars make me

cry.

I am tormented by erotic dreams, and can do

nothing about them.They are similar to the old

dream, of walking on the ship or the seaship or

whatever it is only in this dream the people around

me are naked, and caressing each other, and I am

on my way to my lover but when I wake up and try

to masturbate, nothing happens.I try and try, but I

only exhaust myself.Perhaps if the dream was more

powerfully erotic, more imaginative but it stays the

same.

I've been thinking about the war a lot recently, and

I think I've decided it's wrong.We are defeating

ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by

winning it.All our statistics and assumptions mean

less the more they seem to tell.We surrender, in

our militance, not to one enemy but to all we've

ever fought, within ourselves.We should not be

involved, we ought not to do a thing; we've

gambled our fine irony for a mechanistic piety, and

the faith we fight's our own.

Get out, stay out, keep clear.

Did I say that?

I thought the suit said something there.I'm not

sure.Sometimes I think it's talking to me all the

time when I'm asleep.It might even be talking to me

all the time when I'm awake, too, but it's only

occasionally that I hear it.I think it's mimicking me,

trying to sound the way I sound.Perhaps it wants to

drive me mad, I don't know.

Sometimes I don't know which of us has said

something.

I shiver and try to turn over in the suit, but I can't. I

wish I wasn't here.I wish all this hadn't happened.I

wish it was all a dream, but like the colours of the

earth and air, it's too consistent.

I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.

'Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out,

Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out!'

'Shut up!'

'Oh, you're talking to me at last.'

'I said shut up !'

'But I wasn't saying anything.'

'You were singing!'

'I don't sing.You were singing.'

'Don't lie!Don't you dare lie to me!You were

singing!'

'I assure you -'

'You were!I heard you!'

'You're shouting.Calm down.We still have a long

way to go.We shan't get there if you -'

'Don't you tell me to shut up!'

'I didn't.You told me to shut up.'

'What?'

'I said -'

'What did you say?'

'I-'

'What?What did - who is that?'

'If you'll ju-'

'Who are you?Who are you? Oh no, please'

'Look, ca -'

'No, please'

'What?'

' please'

' What?'

' please please please please'



I don't know what day this is.I don't know where I

am or how far I've come or how far there is still to

go.

Sane now.There never was any suit voice.I made it

all up; it was my own voice all the time.Some state

I must have been in to imagine all that, to be so

unable to cope with being down here, all alone,

that I created somebody else to talk to, like some

lonely kid with a friend nobody else can see.I

believed in it when I thought I heard the voice, but

I don't hear it any more.Even at its most blandly

credible it was just the flat calm of

insanity.Temporary, fortunately.Everything is.

I don't look at the stars any more, in case they start

talking to me too.

Maybe the base is at the core.Maybe I am just

walking round it and can never get any closer to it.

My limbs move on their own now; automatic,

programmed.I hardly need to think.Everything is as

it should be.

We don't need the machines, any more than they

need us.We just think we need them.They don't

matter.Only they need themselves.Of course a

smart suit would have ditched me to save itself; we

didn't build them to resemble ourselves, but that's

the way it works out, in the end.

We created something a little closer to perfection

than ourselves; maybe that's the only way to

progress.Let them try to do the same.I doubt they

can, so they will always be less as well as more

than us.It's all just a sum, a whispered piece of

figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise

howling through the universe, brief oasis in an

infinite desert, a freak bit of working-out in which

we have transcended ourselves, and they are only

the remainder.

Going mad inside a space-suit, indeed.

I think I passed the place where the base used to be

some time ago, but there was nothing there.I am

still walking.I'm not sure I know how to stop.