Pan Sagittarius (2509 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  He responded: “You among few understand Antan; you among few have entered Antan; it is a major reason, although not the only reason, why Althea and I interrupted your suicide—”

  We came in very close indeed, so that the radiance of the metagalaxies filled my space; we plunged back into the streaming, and gleaming superclusters flashed past—paradoxically gleaming for us outside themselves, although each of them was hugging all its light to itself.

  We invaded a metagalactic skin: galaxies sped blurring past; and a third of the way in toward the center, we paused a distance behind the star-spiral that I knew as Sol Galaxy. Paced by the galaxy, we swung in its rearward; and for the first time, oddly I saw the forming of its antan—filamental silver wires spun out behind the galaxy as it swung around its metagalactic center, then weaving to join the thread-currents of other galaxies and metagalaxies, ultimately to wire out behind the total serpentine streaming.

  Thoth required: “Explain it.”

  I told him, savoring what I said: “Each component filament is the fossil trace of a living atom. An atom dies when the lure of its nucleus turns inward upon itself, ceasing to allure the electrons: then the restive electrons depart, as they have always half-wanted to do, and the nucelus progressively and introvertedly differentiates itself into its component nuclear particles; and each irreducible particle shrinks in upon itself, tensive-coarctate. At last there is a blast, and the particles explode into fragments; but then each fragment, having surrendered all energy, subsides tiny-massive into itself, never thereafter to change or to act. Because each frozen fragment is more massive than anything vital, and denser and smaller than anything vital, than even the nucleus of a living hydrogen atom, it cannot thereafter be affected by any living particle, and it passes unnoticed through any living particle that accelerates intersectively with it. And because dying atoms generate new atoms, and these atoms perishing generate new atoms, the fossil particles come to form filaments, and these filaments are immovable imperishable thin wires; and these are what we now behold, pallidly reflecting starlight. They are Antan.”

  Thoth waited, seeming to want expansion.

  I expanded: “In themselves, the filaments preserve frozen all the events that ever occurred in the atoms they mothered. Each of these filaments is therefore an old-fashioned wire recording of all the events that ever affected any atom in its chain. The filaments of parallel atom series record the events of molecules; the spider cables of parallel molecular series record the events of mineral fragments or of living cells; a sufficiently complex system of filaments has recorded, unchangeably and forever, all the events of a human life.”

  “And do you know how to run these filaments, Pan?”

  “When occasion has justified such an invasion of old privacy, Thoth, I have subjectively run these filaments as though I were the magnetic finger of a wire-recorder-reproducer. Whenever I run a system of filaments, I reexperience —with total fidelity of pain and pleasure, of sight and sense and meaning—the whole life of a man or woman. The life as it was lived cannot be changed, it never dies; but except as an invader of Antan may replay it, never again does it live. Should any philosopher be searching for an epistemic guarantor for his theory that the past is unchangeable, here it is.”

  “Then think of the pleasures for you, Pan, if we assign you to eternity in Antan with freedom of choice! Running the frozen filaments of Antan, you can be a savage young bull-man charging virgins; or Caesar, or better Antony, knowing Cleopatra; or Abelard knowing Heloise, preferably prior to a severance; or Don Juan knowing everybody. Should your fancy take a sadistic turn, you could be the Marquis de Sade himself—although this we do not recommend, his imaginings were better than his happenings, there were nobles under Caligula and Clovis who had more perverse fun—we can find them for you. Or should your thoughts go religiophilosophical, you could be Socrates, or Jeanne d’Arc, or Bruno—”

  “As to all except the last three—I would not be damned for such fiendishness?”

  “Only as you might damn yourself.”

  “I would not damn myself, Thoth, since the pleasures would be harmless, the harm being already done. But I would suffer for the harm already done. And there would be another embarrassing entailment. Always in the course of reliving any life, I would be doing so in the grounding of my own memories and identity and my own will-impulsion to make free choices—but I would be totally at the mercy of the past perceivings and willings of the person whom I would be haunting, and so I would be unable to change any event that ever actually happened, and this I would be continually experiencing as frustration.”

  The Thoth-head meditatively regarded me. And presently it observed: “You have gone far, Pan, with your researches. But in one man’s lifetime, no matter how long it may be, one can never go far enough; indeed, during all time up to now, even potential omniscience has -not arrived at actualizing omniscience. And so it appears that you have not yet stumbled upon the if-nodes of Antan.”

  Once he had explained them, and had shown me a few, I comprehended why—during a few of my uptime-explorings—I had been uneased by the seeming of a paradox: two different versions of the same history, equally real. For a while I had suspected that this might be verification of old John Dewey’s theory of a continuously changing history—but I had not been able to accept, concerning actuality, a hypothesis whose framework could only be epistemological. Then for a further while I had toyed with the concept of alternate probability-worlds; but soon I had concluded to give this hypothesis grounding only in downtime, not in uptime. So I had been left awash, concerning these experiences. But now that Thoth had shown me the perfectly simple solution, I wondered at my myopia…

  During the lifetime of an atom or a human, there are multiple moments when a balance can be tipped, or a decision can be made, one way or another, with no definitely identifiable system of mechanics to determine the tip or the choice. And as the actuality of the atom or the human reaches determination and freezes in Antan, the perseverating locus of indecision—a state in the atom, and in the human a lingering thought of what might have been—freezes with less immediacy, remains for a long duration indecisively germinal. Such a temporal locus in a filament, or such a system of interrelated loci in a filamental complex, is an if-node. And here, indefinitely into the future, that past can be—not changed, but paralleled and superseded. For cultivation of an if-node can make it burgeon into a new and parallel germinality; so that, in Antan at least, what might have been can (if you know how) exist eternally and unchangeably alongside of what was.

  Conrad’s Lord Jim, in an instant of weakness, jumped—and could not unjump, and passed a lifetime compensating for remorse. That was eternally so: any runner of Antan in any subsequent era would always find it frozen so. But if the soul of Lord Jim had been able to return with power to his own Antan-filament, and find that if-node, and refrain from jumping—and if (this is a crucial complication) all the people and all the environment associated or potentially to be associated with Lord Jim could at the same instant have had their if-nodes stimulated into burgeoning—Antan could have been multiplied by a germinal matrix of parallel tracks that might have been better for the people. But because these new tracks would always be growing beneath the surface of actuality, keeping pace with actuality but never overtaking it, the present could never be affected by this new past.

  .…Unless, of course, some power should accelerate these parallel germinalities…

  “Operation Second Chance,” Thoth told me, “is founded on the proposition that one who repents ought to have opportunity to make redress. But no redress is complete unless it is entirely new history—entirely new biography. And no redress is meaningful unless it is a different thought on the part of the one who erred in the first place. Nor is any redress life-meaningful if it is undertaken after the individual has made the mistake and seen the consequences and second-guessed himself. No: to be life—meaningful, the so-called redress must be a different action taken at an
if-node, taken by an individual who has no memory or clear foresight of what actually followed that if-node, but who like any other human being running with life must project or sensitively feel the probable consequences better than first he did, and therefore take action different from what he did, without knowing what first he did, and imagining that this decision has never been confronted by him before.

  “We are a very young operation, Pan, and the members of our crew are few. We are based in Hell because this is where souls who fully repent tend to gravitate, eschewing glory prior to a purgatory that will involve not merely self-purging but redress. We locate such a soul, one who knows in a rough sort of way where-when and how he erred. We reinject that soul into his own Antan at some point prior to the if-node, and we allow him to rerun his own antan in current as he ran his life in the first place, with memories of all events before that point in time but no memories of what followed. And when he reaches the crucial if-node—”

  I was frowning heavily in my profound concern. “If the soul reaches that if-node with all prior events and memories identical with what they were, and with environmental pressures and urges identical with what they were—how can he act differently, Thoth?”

  He said: “We nudge.”

  I studied that. “You mean—you direct? you exert influence? But if the soul is now being helped by knowledgeable outside influence, how can his different action be counted as credit?”

  The Thoth-face grinned. “Pan, still you are wound in the human economy of debits and credits. You forget that as a result of the new action at the if-node, the soul can (if it works right) experience thereafter a whole real life of the good that might have been, and all the souls who were affected by this if-action can similarly be reinjected into their new past lives to experience in new reality the good that might have been; and when after their new deaths they contemplate with new enlightenment the new good that paralleled the old evil, knowing that the new good was created by a better decision of the old villain—” He stopped: enough had been said.

  Gazing at him, I pressed: “But the external nudge—”

  The Thoth-face frowned. “It is not a science, Pan. We are feeling our way. I assure you that you will be a pioneer, there are few guidelines that we can give you. If the nudge is right, it is this sort of nudge: it has the effect of removing blinders that circumstance has imposed upon the soul, so that of his own power and will he sees and feels more clearly; and it does so in such a way that he removes his own blinders. The nudge may properly be very slight, or very powerful; but always it must be just at the threshold-level of urging the soul to remove his own blinders—never at the compulsion-level of requiring him to remove his blinders. It is a treacherous business, Pan: the agent has to judge the nudge: if he undernudges, history is repeated and the soul-remorse is reinforced; if he overnudges, the better outcome is not the soul’s doing—and eventually, the soul will know it.”

  My comprehension was a fist closing on my heart. I put it to Thoth: “You want me to be one of your agents?”

  The face registered affirmation.

  “I will have guidance?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If we fully understood this business, we would not require intelligent-sensitive agents. There will be cases where you will have a sharp briefing, and other cases where you will merely be dropped into a problematic area with the task of determining the problem for yourself, and still other cases where you will actually lose your own identity and become the man or woman (because you will be caught up in his brain) until, approaching the if-node, your own past clarity causes your present fogginess to feed the node into the brain. You will win some, you will lose some; you will overnudge, you will undernudge—and with luck, sometimes you will nudge just right.

  “Candidly, Pan, as of now there are only three of us: Althea, a man named Vogeler, and me. Vogeler I doubt, a bit: there are indications of selfishness. Althea is—well, you have known her, rather well: feel no embarrassment about this, she and I know each other rather well; if I ever begin to doubt her, I will already be doubting myself—but she makes mistakes, and so do I. For my part, I take a few cases, but mainly I am wrapped up in study and planning. Call on Althea whenever you need a critique, Pan—but the critique must always be after the fact’, you are on your own.”

  I contemplated the cobwebs of silvery filaments: the Antan of the universe.

  I said low: “Why don’t you drop me into the first one, and see how I bounce?”

  Part Three

  A Certain Garden

  Pan, legend hath it that on the planet Erth, Edom the first man and Avé the first woman dwelt in a garden that they and their descendants could have inhabited forever. But the devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted Avé into eating God-forbidden fruit, and she gave of it to Edom; whereafter they knew their nakedness and covered it, and God banished them from the garden. Like most folk legends, it disguises a real human happening, and the morality derived from it is not necessarily a God-given morality. So we are putting you into the old Antan-track shortly before the serpent turned up. Thus the first of your assignments will affect two who were reputedly the first of all humans. We will be fascinated to watch what you do with it.

  3

  I stood in a primeval garden, occupying an astral version of my own body—but this body was invisible. I had no instructions at all: I did not even know whom to haunt. And I saw nobody to haunt: the garden was lush, it was virginal, it was apparently unpeopled.

  Except by yonder serpent.

  Since the colorsinuosity of the seven-foot python was all the animal life in evidence, I gave it my full pleasured attention.

  And presently I comprehended, from certain telepathic emanations coming my way, that this python was rather more intelligently reactive than most snakes.

  This python had, in fact, a human mind. And the quality of its mental intraput suggested that it had, superimposed on its snake brain, a human brain. An astral brain, presumably. In other words, the serpent was an intruder in this garden—or at least, its possessing mind was. It might be Thoth, checking me out. Or Althea. Or—who? Vogeler?

  Carefully I disciplined my own mind and brain to keep their intraput internal, so the serpent would not detect my presence. Then I concentrated subjectively on the serpentine stream of consciousness. And gradually I gathered that this pythonoid human was astonishingly ambivalent.

  The snake form, entirely physical and infinitely subtle, enabled its alien possessor to savor totally from tongue-touch to tailtip the divine sensuosity of the garden. It also generated in its possessing mind awkward conflicts of conscience—conflicts which presumably the snake’s own mind did not share, although this minimal mind passed undetected by me.

  The long slender brilliant-hued fine-scaly body was writhingly replete with kinaesthetic motion-rewards and everywhere sensitized with nerve endings of pleasure: the serpent brain deliciously interpreted every sensation into elaborate joy-without-consequence. As the python rippled through ferns or scraped across rocks, its body tasted different kinds of pleasure differentially from segment to segment. Concerning all these goodies, the snake’s human guest-mind seemed undividedly happy-But then the guest found himself leaping upon an unwary faun, wrapping it in coil upon coil, lovingly tightening his grip until the faun took thin-braying leave of life. The serpent brain urged its mind-guest to rejoice; but the astral-human brain that the guest had brought with him damned the sadism and pitied the victim.

  When thereafter, in an unshaded sun-beaten place, the minded serpent lay torpidly soaking in divine warmth and tasting internally the faun molecules enriching all the cells of his body cell by cell, the snake brain soothed its guest with ultimate serenity while the human brain raised moral doubts. The guest-mind discomfortably sought reconciliation—and uneasily settled for a decision that killing-for-function was part of the cosmic design for subhuman nature, while the faun was probably a masochist. Presently, in this delicious torpor, the serpent brain b
egan stealthily to take command: it was not that the guest’s human intelligence lapsed—it was rather that the highly developed connate resources of the snake brain redirected his consciousness, lulling his superego…

  I test-challenged: “Are we a team here, Vogeler? My instructions don’t include you.” In fact, I had no instructions, and this guest-mind would not necessarily be Vogeler.

  Sprung out of sensuous tranquillity, the serpent stiffened. Then the Vogeler-mind inquired: “Pardon? Oh—it’s you, Pan, they told me about you.” His countertelepathy seemed nettled. “Well, my instructions certainly don’t include you—so probably you have misunderstood your instructions. What are they?”

  I mind-grinned. “To be honest—I really don’t have any. But here I am anyway, somehow. What are yours?”

  “Mine are precise enough. Proceed to the planet Erth. Go to such-and-such a garden in the year 100004 B.c. and take the form of a serpent. Observe the man and the woman, and act as you see fit. End of my orders. And you have none. So you see, I am the one to be here; and clearly you are supposed to be elsewhere. I’m truly sympathetic, Pan—but it’s your move.”

  All right: they had put me here without mentioning Vogeler, and him here without mentioning me. Was I somehow supposed to redeem Vogeler? it seemed improbable, and I chose to dismiss the idea that he was supposed to nudge me into self-redemption. Until I would know more, I shouldn’t act: it might wreck something. Therefore I sat in the lush grass, hugged my invisible knees, and queried: “Mind if I observe?”

  “Watch the master,” Vogeler responded, “and stay out of it. Have you seen the woman, Pan?”

  “What woman?”

  “Youhaven t seen her? She’ll be along presently. What a dish! Twenty miles ahead of any other dame in her clan—I think she’s a mutation. Name’s Ave. And wait till you see her man Edom! definitely a mutation, out of a neighboring clan. He stole her last week, they’re honeymooning here—”