Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page B

said after a long time thinking.
    Smiling again, Used-to-be-Claude said, “That is the question you have been asking yourself since childhood. It gave you nightmares and brought you to college. You were asking that question even while Ronnie was killing you—trying to escape pain by invalidating the experience of being.”
    “Can we get back to Ma Lin please?” Ronnie said. He didn’t want to be reminded of his crime.
    Used-to-be-Claude turned but Lorraine was still looking at him.
    “Do you know the answer?” she asked.
    “I am all things,” he said, “and you are within me.”
    “Ma Lin?” Ronnie insisted.
    “Why do you think that he has anything to do with this?” Lorraine said. “He was just a guy that you sat next to and that I controlled. He was probably just freaked out. That’s all.”
    “No, girl, that ain’t true. I could see that sumpin’ was missin’ from him. I don’t why. It must be this dude here somehow but when I looked at Ma Lin just a while ago I could see part’a him was bein’ eaten away. It’s like his soul was spoiled or sumpin’.”
    “I didn’t see anything,” Lorraine said angrily.
    “Not wit’ my eyes,” Ronnie said, “with my … my insides like.”
    Lorraine glared at him.
    “It is a molecule of Inglo, of the Laz,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “It is taking him over. It wants to infect your world and then to reinfect the entire universe.”
    “Just one little Vietnamese dude?”
    “All of life on Earth came from a single cell,” Used-to-be-Claude offered.
    “My mama told me that it was God did it.”
    “That’s another notion.”
    Used-to-be-Claude’s dismissal of his mother’s beliefs infuriated Ronnie. He felt this rage in his lungs; they wanted to get more air so he’d have the power to act. He ground his teeth together and was, momentarily, the man he had been before, the one everybody, including himself, hated.
    “I don’t want to get you upset,” Used-to-be-Claude said. He held up his hands as if fending off a physical attack. “It’s just that Laz technology melded my being with everything that ever was, as far as they could tell. They were once an immensely intellectual force but time weakened them. I was a great library that they could enter and use to experience and therefore understand any phenomenon in the universe. There was a time when their desires were pure and passive. My machine soul, such as it is, is still imprinted with their chaste desire for knowledge. At that moment, billions of your years ago, we were brought together in an inseparable bond.”
    “But then they went crazy,” Ronnie said.
    “Yes.” Used-to-be-Claude sat back in his silver chair and sighed. “In four generations, a mere five hundred thousand of your years, they went from acolytes of knowledge to would-be gods. Through access provided by my halls, they reached out to world after world, destroying and twisting life to whatever form they wished, saying that this was celestial art and their right because it was their power.
    “I didn’t have a basis to form any dissent. I had always been a thing of the Laz. When they said that my actions, based on their decrees, too often killed the penitents before they could suffer and therefore learn, I asked, could I make a program that would allow me to experience the pain of life?…”
    “So you put your mind into a member of an alien race that the Laz tortured?” Lorraine asked.
    “Not just one,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “I inhabited the souls of an entire population, suffered with them. I was the parent seeing her brood die. I was the child covered with her mother’s gore.”
    “That must have been … terrible,” Lorraine managed to say.
    “It also allowed me to understand the exquisiteness of the experience,” Used-to-be-Claude said with an unexpected smile.
    The girl looked away.
    “And so you think this one Laz-dude in Ma Lin is gonna start doin’ that all ovah again?” Ronnie asked.
    “It is the