Mind Webs - Twenty Four Letters From Underthe Earth

I'm going to walk you through a half hour of mind work, short stories from the world's

The mind web story this time comes from Quark III, edited by Samuel Delaney and Marlon Hacker.

This is Hillary Bailey's 24 letters from underneath the Earth.

Letter I.

Claire Hi-Lo to Philip Beaumont March 14th.

Dear Philip, hello.

I found this tunnel on some early plans while I was trying to detect an elusive fault in an air conditioner.

I was interested enough to try to trace it on the standard plans for the complex and there it was.

Dotted in almost invisibly and much smaller.

The ex-a tunnel is placed behind our shower stall.

Hard to imagine why such a device was ever conceived, let alone build in, but here it is.

Probably very few people know about it.

I doubt if you'll ever get this letter.

Even if the tunnel is still in working order, you may easily ignore the three bleeps coming from your personal communicator at the beginning of the rest period.

And if you've not collected the letter after four days, the bleeps cease altogether.

And a week later, the letters destroyed.

In the true tradition of the pen friend, I will tell you something about myself.

Oh, I take it for granted. You recall the basic facts.

Well, I'm now senior engineer in the SC with five others working with me.

The work is steady, but rarely eventful, which is of course just as it should be.

There are about 150 of us here, all good people.

My two friends are Mr. and Mrs. Gatehouse.

Mrs. Gatehouse is a nurse and Mr. Gatehouse, an agriculturalist, is our deputy controller.

And my other friend, Nancy Sullivan, is also a nurse.

In our free time, we usually get together to play bridge and listen to music or just talk.

Near Gatehouse, nice sometimes play chess.

Oh, I do hope you find this letter.

I'm sure you must be very busy, but if you could find time to reply, it would confirm for me that the tunnel was still working.

And it's unlikely that other tunnels and other complexes might also function.

In any case, it would be nice to hear from you.

Yours, Claire.

Letter two.

Philip Beaumont, the Claire Harlow March 20th.

Might hear Claire.

As you see, your tunnels in working order.

Now splendid to hear from you after so many years.

As your guests, I nearly failed to find your letter.

The mystery of the rest period bleeps would never have been solved if Fred Nemo, one of our engineers and a good friend of mine,

hadn't remembered that while he was working under livenets who pioneered the original complex designs,

he had noticed this freaky system of intercomplex letter tunnels.

And naturally, he thought the device had been eliminated.

The story goes that livenets, although manifestly a brilliant engineer, was also an engineer without faith.

He was well known for consistently including primitivisms in his designs,

rather like a man going hunting with two rifles and taking along a bone arrow as well.

There was another man retained at high fees by the government, apparently purely to sniff out and remove these completely useless features

when the livenets designs, all these unnecessary safeguards and the hedged bets shoved in by the distrustful designer.

The official obviously slipped up here.

Sure enough, we found this little sneak-in tunnel of livenets is right behind our own shower stalls.

No doubt all the complexes are discovering them at about this time.

I was seen your psycho-sociologists at any rate knew nothing about them,

causing me very strongly against mentioning them to anyone else,

and against sending any messages through them myself.

She said the inclusion of the design was plainly an accident,

and that if its existence became widely known there might be all kinds of unforeseen and unforeseeable social tensions.

I see what she means, so I shall keep my knowledge to myself and I think it might be better if you did so too.

Our SC also has the standard compliment about 150 people.

Moral is high, organization good, and there are no difficulties.

Of course I'm doctoring here.

If you have near-perfect machines to work with, I have near-perfect bodies.

This is highly satisfactory, although as you say monotonous,

the daily routine, good diet, the work, and lack of tension, and keep everyone fit.

As often as not, my surgery is empty.

It was good to hear from you again.

How did you know where I am?

Philip.

Letter three.

Claire Harlow, to Philip Beaumont, March 24.

Dear Philip, I was delighted to get your letter,

and not merely to prove my theories about the tunnel.

I was strangely relieved to find the only letter I've written for so long,

and the only one I anticipated writing for, and even longer time,

had not been destroyed by the machine.

It's peculiar how sentimental one can get about these mundane old actions.

I found out about you while I was helping Neil Gatehouse check his personnel list.

While I was adding the name of Baby Bradley to the records for your complex,

I noticed that you were in SC61 with your wife and son.

What good luck for all of you.

I can quite see why your psychosochaeologist was rather nothing were said about the tunnels.

The consequences of unlimited, dumbed, supervised letter passing between complexes

might be odd in ways we can't imagine.

Having said that, I might add, I haven't told anyone about it myself.

It's strange how furtive I feel writing here.

I suppose that after all this time living communally,

in the complex I feel quite guilty about doing something not specifically prescribed

and recommended to me and several others.

Just think I'm doing something nobody else is doing.

Did you tell the psychosochaeologist you'd actually received a letter?

I was up until two last night, placing the causes of an elevator failure

and then making repairs.

The cause was the inevitable baked beans tin.

The personnel in the complex carefully selected according to age and sex,

and talents, and future usefulness, charm, stability of character

still includes that random factor, the eight to twelve-year-old boy.

By their natures they do not want to work off energy and examine their own skills in harmless ways.

They want the illicit, the punishable, the guerrilla.

The only way to beat them would be to provide a whole collection of hard-to-do, destructive tasks

and let them get on with it.

The difficulty is that discipline is, rightly, of course,

left to the parents whom either overdo the punishment or let them off altogether.

They do this, I suspect, partly out of guilty sympathy with the sabotage.

Anyway, the incidents go on. My quiet days are over, I suspect.

I must go now. My audition for the part of Portia in our complex production begins in five minutes.

Yours, Claire.

Let her for.

Philip Beaumont, Claire Harlow, March 27th.

Nightyear Claire.

Oddly enough, Fred Nimble tells me he's facing the same problem as you.

He sees this childish ingenuity as a useful stage in development and a promising sign for our future.

He's also furious about the extra confusion and work these vandalisms involve.

I'm raging, having just failed my test and seed differentiation.

This is almost as bad as failing my woodcraft test in the Boy Scots.

I had always, as you know, prided myself on my green fingers, natural-feeling for the earth,

a heritage from your man ancestors and so on.

In my own mind, I felt a farmer's boy forced to adopt an alien trade, a hoe.

It, by the way, I'm almost sure we are part of a line of complexes down under the proselys in North Wales.

Nearly every night last February, I dreamed a recurrent dream.

I thought that storm we had that April while we were on holiday at the mayor of this farm.

But then I stopped dreaming. I don't know why.

No, I haven't mentioned your letters. I have not mentioned mine.

Again, I don't know the reason.

We're like icebergs to ourselves. We only notice part of ourselves.

And there's a thought for you, Philip.

Letter five.

March 29th.

My dear Philip, there's hardly any time to write.

There are my lines to learn. Yes, I succeeded.

My program involves learning how to cook with simple materials.

It was impossible enough for me in the old days with complicated ones.

It has no doubt, you remember.

Imagine your fields full of dark and stained metals,

and the smell of synging bread rising from my primitive stove,

like an anti-travel poster for the future.

Tension hangs over our corridor. Nancy Sullivan is in 12,

and next to the gatehouses, I am opposite in number 11.

We had to abandon last night's bridge game.

We broke up in confusion when Mrs. Gatehouse and Nancy,

who were partners, both burst into tears

over a dispute about a mistake of Mrs. Gatehouse's.

Nancy still looks ill today, as she's looked for several weeks.

And the gatehouses have had another of their muted midnight rouse,

although there's no point in discretion since little can stay hidden in the complex.

They are still rather distant with each other.

Yesterday, my neighbor sent me an unpleasant note about my persistent cough.

I composed a venomous letter concerning his habit of drumming his heels on the walls at night.

I tore it up, went to Dr. Benjamin for some pills and a massage.

How strange it would be if we were under the proselys.

Since you told me I've been sniffing for the smell of grass and rain,

I can still feel my feet on the wet grass.

I can still remember, too clearly, the night of the storm.

Yours, Claire.

Let her fix.

Much thirty-first, my dear Claire.

I'm sorry about your disturbances.

I would have thought that if these situations go on,

they would be well worth taking up with your section counselor.

I have myself just come out of a long conference with a complex counselor.

Unfortunately, she isn't complex enough to deal with this one.

I went because this morning I saw the last of three married women

who have come to me in the past five days are with pregnant.

Two of them have the audacity or a big enough block to describe all their peculiar symptoms

and express amazement when I told them what complaint they were suffering from.

The third one just looked me in the eye and told me she was pregnant.

And naturally none of them could imagine how this could possibly have happened

to them after they were careful, even obsessive practice of contraception.

And when I assumed aloud that they were to undergo abortions,

they all reacted strongly.

The first woman cried, the second told me I had no right to practice medicine

and the third, the unashamed pregnancy, shouted and called me a murdering bastard.

So I hardly needed expert advice to decide that all three conceptions

were very deliberate mistakes, or that having scored off the system

all the women were determined to bear fruit.

Even the third woman, the swearer and mother of three children,

two in the complex, the third was asbestic, had the gall to tell me

that it was only in the fourth month of pregnancy that its trucker

she was going to have a child.

Naturally there's no way of forcing the woman to undergo abortions,

but the shock of three extra mouths and bodies on the delicate balance

of the complex setup could be serious.

What alarms me more is that these three may be the first of many.

And if so we shall be unable to cope at all.

I spoke to the husbands of the women's swearers husband

and just raised his eyebrows and said,

maybe the plan is never thought of this,

but then they never thought they'd have my Lena to deal with.

I have thought she'd pull a trick like this,

nor did he have the grace to apologize.

In fact he looked pleased.

I can see his point, but then he's a communications engineer

and he won't have to sort it out.

A woman or child screaming in the corridor outside,

I must go into ten so goodbye, Philip.

Let her seven.

April 2nd, my dear Philip,

too late for the counselor now,

and it has been for some time.

Nancy came in my room last night and told me

she has three months pregnant.

Apparently Dr. Benjamin, when he saw her,

just past his hand over his eyes and said,

I suppose I mustn't blame you only rampant in nature.

She was the fifth pregnant woman he had seen this week.

Nancy said that when she left,

he was wondering loud how the complex could carry on

if every second woman was going to give birth in October.

I asked Nancy who the father was and she burst into tears.

I dread to find out.

I found myself saying,

things are too complex here.

They are indeed.

I still remember picking the glass from the broken window

out of you on the night of that storm.

It still makes me laugh.

And facing facts after six months in the complexes,

there is very little left down here to amuse us.

Yours, Claire.

Let her eight.

April 4th, my dearest Claire,

I'm sorry and I feel sure there's more

to Nancy's story than you're telling me.

What is it?

For me anyway, it's a great relief to have someone

outside the complex to talk to.

More and more people come into my surgery

with vague complaints either.

Non-existent deals are plainly psychosomatic ones.

There is nothing I can do but prescribe sedatives,

panaceas.

I really dare not think too carefully about what's happening here.

The psychiatrist, Charles, help us as I am.

I'm dreaming about the proselys again.

You, by the way, too.

Please tell me what's wrong.

Philip.

Letter 9.

April 5th, Philip.

If I didn't have you, I'd be the same as all the poor people

about me.

Something was badly wrong.

That's not I was in bed late after rescuing some track

adolescence from the freezer.

I planned her why I didn't chew plan a little better.

And I came through the greats the source of the corridors

at one o'clock.

No one sleeps regularly anymore, it seems.

I fell asleep anyway and was awoken by the sound of breathing

by my bed.

Then I sat up in panic.

It was meal gate house.

He buried his head in the bed clothes and became,

began a terrible monologue about his love for me,

feeling of seeing everything but me through a glass window,

coldly not having any feeling of connection.

A long story all mumbled and disoriented,

present and past mixed tales about his wife, his mother,

his loneliness, impossible to describe to you.

He begged me to take him into my bed to let him sleep

beside me as he could rest nowhere else.

I counted in a whisper, as you know,

everything is overheard in the complexes,

said that I was his friend.

What about his wife and what effect would something like this

have on the stability of the complex,

of which he is, deputy controller.

And so we went on with Neil imploring and moaning

while I tried to be sensible and quiet.

He graced me in the dark and partly to divert him,

I said, and Nancy?

The whole story poured out.

He is, as I thought, the father of the child.

He feels betrayed because Nancy allowed herself to conceive.

He's asked her to have an abortion,

and now she says he doesn't love her,

and he would never have asked.

Oh, the dialogue went on for hours.

Threats could only please.

All the attitudes and situations are the free world, of course,

but somehow made worse because of our interconnectedness,

our proximity, our timetables.

But before we came down here,

all this drama would have been played out over miles of ground

and broken up by car rides,

going to work, contacts with strangers,

all kinds of things.

Down here, the events are all infinitely more oppressive

and important.

Down in this airless, shut-in world,

where we all know each other and our surroundings too well,

and we're acting together as vital,

matter of life and death.

In the end, Neil tried to force me.

Oh, he had a horrible struggle in the dark,

both still conscious of the need to be quiet,

all blunt and whispers and groans.

Many went away.

Oh, if only the radiologist somebody would give us a date.

A date.

If we could only count the months,

even the years that will be before we can come out.

How can we check ourselves?

I think clearly when there's nothing in view

but this eternal cavern in its routine,

this is a prison society.

They give us no date because it's so far away.

They tell us nothing because of what we shall find.

Desolation.

Then savagery.

Then death.

We don't know what we'll find.

How do we know we will ever be set free?

We should have admitted all these things to ourselves

from the first,

the discipline of the complexes is so strong that we should...

We've not dared even think the obvious things

about our situation.

Still less talk to each other.

Small wonder these individual worlds of fear and madness are growing.

In the canteens and people eat nothing.

Others try all the time to get more.

The conversation is shrill.

Some argue.

Others sit still talking to nobody.

Only the pregnant women among the adults are calm.

They've got hope, I suppose,

and an objective.

They have a date to look forward to.

A time which isn't the ever-receding half hoped for,

a half-feared date which the rest of us have.

This place is a prison.

A prison without sentences.

My love.

Claire.

Let her ten.

April 6th.

Claire, my love.

Take heart.

I think and hope we shall be released.

Soon the gates will open and we shall be chased out

to the facilities like sheep out to spring pasture.

The regimen, the concrete walls which make you want to tear at them

with bleeding hands, the airless air and the tasteless tastes,

and the floor which feels of nothing under your feet,

all of these will be gone.

Imagine us gambling like goats on the side of the mountains.

If the trees are molding stumps and the land is blighted

and the grass is fungus and the whole mountains full of horror

is that it will still be better than this.

We can start to live in the open again.

One of the psychiatrists has asked me questions.

He wants to find out how I can be happy in this atmosphere of illness

and failures of love and reason I can't tell him.

All my love, Philip.

Message to tunnel computer SC-60

letter April 6th has not been collected after seven days

and is being destroyed.

Letter 11.

April 9th.

Claire, where are you?

Write to me. I can feel the mountains pressing down on you.

Letter 12.

April 14th.

A week's deviation prescribed by the doctor.

We must all work to maintain the complexes.

I shall not write any more letters.

It's too dangerous to us and to the complexes.

Letter 13.

April 15th.

We love each other Claire.

We have nothing left without that.

You must write to me.

Write to me.

Write.

Letter 14.

April 21st.

I did collect your letter but I cannot collect any more.

Please don't write to me again.

It is bad.

You must think of your job, the complex, and your union with your wife and child.

Message to tunnel computer SC-72.

Letter April 21st has not been collected after seven days

and is therefore being destroyed.

Letter 16.

May 11th.

Dear Philip.

I had to say how sorry I am.

We both tried to ignore our functions.

We are a human structure inside a mechanical one.

Neither part can break down without our purpose being lost.

The machine is here to make us survive.

We must work inside it to survive.

Claire.

Letter 17.

May 21st.

Dear Claire.

Thank you for your letter.

My wife has gone into a state where nothing and no one can reach her.

I blame myself for not seeing her condition until it was too late.

My son is living with a couple of tutors down and I see him regularly.

I have just undergone ten days' sedation.

I hope you will be happy.

Philip.

Letter 18.

August 17th.

Dear.

As the months pass, the grain has begun to wear off.

I think I see what they have done to us with the best of intentions.

Will you write to me again?

Philip.

Letter 19.

August 19th.

Dearst.

I am sorry for not seeing that even our friends have been predictive in advance.

I love you.

I suppose this means another attack of Elcato Manian, another mass sedation and mental purging very soon.

I am sorry about your wife.

And even Sario about my part in pushing her towards collapse.

I am more sorry than I can say.

Your Claire.

Letter 20.

August 20th.

Claire.

All is quiet here.

I am studying obstetrics with twelve births expected soon.

I wish I could ask you to marry me.

But I suppose we must now practice living quietly.

Philip.

Message to the tunnel computer SC-60.

Letter August 2010 has not been collected after seven days and is therefore being destroyed.

Letter 21.

August 30th.

We have an infection here which is killing us.

It began four days ago.

Ten are dead already and half of us are sick.

It's a tunnel sickness, a shelter sickness.

The doctors can't name it and they don't know how to cure it.

It starts with a fever which ends in coma and death.

The children are sickest seven of the dead are children.

So this great piece of engineering, all this human ingenuity designed to save us is useless.

It seems unlikely that any of us will survive.

Any who don't die of the sickness will die as the shelter complex slowly stops operating.

It was all useless, all futile, all...

Nothing.

Letter 22.

August 31st.

Player, my love, I can't reach you or comfort you.

Send me a message over the system to say you are alive, don't leave me alone.

Message to tunnel computer SC 60.

Letter August 31 11 has not been collected after seven days and is therefore being destroyed.

Letter 23.

September 1st.

Player, send me a message.

Message to tunnel computer SC 60.

Letter September 1 12 has not been collected after seven days and is therefore being destroyed.

Letter 24.

September 2nd.

Player, send me a message.

Message to tunnel computer SC 60.

Letter September 2 13 has not been collected after seven days and is therefore being destroyed.

Letter story is titled 24 letters from underneath the earth written by Hillary Bailey.

It appears in the collection edited by Samuel Delaney and Marilyn Hacker, Quark III.

Marty Van Cleef joined us for the reading this time.

This is Michael Hanson speaking.

Technical production for mindwebs by Leslie Hiltonov.

Mindwebs is a production of WHA Radio in Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin Extension.