We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick Page B

pain-circuits.”
    “Pain-circuits!”
    “Yeah, it has to have them or it’ll run into a wall or some goddam object and massacre itself.” Bundy jerked a thumb toward the silent, watching Stanton. “That’s got ‘em, too. What else, for chrissakes?”
    We were, beyond doubt, watching a living creature being born. It now had begun to take note of us; its eyes, jet black, moved up and down, from side to side, taking us all in, the vision of us. In the eyes no emotion showed, only pure perception of us. Wariness beyond the capacity of man to imagine. The cunning of a life form from beyond the lip of our universe, from another land entirely. A creature plopped into our time and our space, conscious of us and itself, its existence, here; the black, opaque eyes rolled, focusing and yet not focusing, seeing everything and in a sense not picking out any one thing. As if it were primarily in suspension, yet; waiting with such infinite reserve that I could glimpse thereby the dreadful fear it felt, fear so great that it could not be called an emotion. It was fear as absolute existence: the basis of its life. It had become separate, yanked away from some fusion that we could not experience—at least, not now.Maybe once we all had lain quietly in that fusion. For us, the rupturing was long past; for the Lincoln it had just now occurred—was now taking place.
    Its moving eyes still did not alight anywhere, on anything; it refused to perceive any given, individual thing.
    “Gosh,” Maury muttered. “It sure looks at us funny.”
    Some deep skill was imbedded in this thing. Imparted to it by Pris? I doubted it. By Maury? Out of the question. Neither of them did this, nor had Bob Bundy whose idea of a good time was to drive like hell down to Reno to gamble and whore around. They had dropped life into this thing’s ear, but it was just a transfer, not an invention; they had passed life on, but it did not originate in any or all of them. It was a contagion; they had caught it once and now these materials had contracted it—for a time. And what a transformation. Life is a form which matter takes … I made that up as I watched the Lincoln thing perceive us and itself. It is something which matter does. The most astonishing—the one truly astonishing—form in the universe; the one which, if it did not exist, could never have been predicted or even imagined.
    And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It’s fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear; much worse. Absolute
dread
. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy. Yet the Lincoln stirred, rose out of this. Why? Because it had to. Movement, action, were implied by the extensiveness of the dread. That state, by its own nature, could not be endured.
    All the activity of life was an effort to relieve this one state. Attempts to mitigate the condition which we saw before us now.
    Birth, I decided, is not pleasant. It is worse than death; you can philosophize about death—and you probably will: everyone else has. But birth! There is no philosophizing, noeasing of the condition. And the prognosis is terrible: all your actions and deeds and thoughts will only embroil you in living the more deeply.
    Again the Lincoln groaned. And then in a hoarse growl it mumbled words.
    “What?” Maury said. “What’d it say?”
    Bundy giggled. “Hell, it’s a voice-tape but it’s running through the transport backwards.”
    The first words uttered by the Lincoln thing: uttered backward, due to an error in wiring.

8
    It took several days to rewire the Lincoln simulacrum. During those days I drove from Ontario west through the Oregon Sierras, through the little logging town of John Day which has always been my favorite town in the western United States. I did not stop there, however; I was too restless. I kept on west until I joined the north-south