Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven

by Anthony Bartlett

  And that was that. No more was said, and when they arrived back at the mansion they went their separate ways. Next day Adorno returned to directing his studies as if nothing had happened. The only difference was he began to point him more urgently in the direction of biology and genetics, covering topics in physics only in summary fashion. Palmiro obeyed dutifully but while he researched structures and organelles, proteins and DNA, his mind returned like the swing of a pendulum to Adorno's words. What had he meant, “The real loser is Sarobindo"? And, behind his words, his intentions at the banquet still remained a mystery. What had he wanted to achieve? It was inconceivable he had done those things just out of spite, or a mere desire just to push his point of view. He was a scientist not a philosopher. What was he up to?

  And, no matter how Adorno had played it down, there was the problem of Pascale, the person everyone had ended up blaming. He remained continuously anxious for her and always had his ears alert for news. It wasn't long before one of Adorno's assistants said something which realized his worst fears. She was a quiet bookish sort named Phillipa and she casually let drop that she had heard about the disruption at the banquet. It seemed the woman Pascale had quickly been deported as an anti-social. He questioned her at once as to what that meant but she only had the vaguest idea. She believed perhaps there was some kind of colony, perhaps to the south. Her puzzled irritation at his further questions showed more clearly than any words that for someone to be deported meant they were to be forgotten.

  Palmiro was beside himself. That night he couldn't sleep. Everything he and Pascale had done together returned to him now, memory after memory, like waves beating on a shore. He felt he had thrown her to the wolves when it should have been him to speak the truth about Heaven. It had always been his job to denounce the falsehoods of the Homeland. But here instead it was Pascale, the one who had always had his back and been there for him. She had spoken and suffered the consequences, and he had let it happen.

  The more he thought the more he couldn't bear it. He got up as soon as it was light and went to Adorno's study to wait for him. He drifted around among the books and articles on genomes and sequencing and mutation but couldn't settle to read. It was as if all his understanding and purpose were now wrapped up with Adorno, and yet there was one other person who had been truly important to him and she was now in real trouble. It was essential that he speak to his patron and find a solution. Normally Adorno seemed to know when he was in the study, but this time when Palmiro wanted to see him urgently he delayed. By the time he finally arrived Palmiro felt exhausted. When the scientist came through the door his apprentice could hardly open his mouth and simply stared at him in a kind of anguish.

  Adorno's shadowed glance darted back at him. “What's wrong with you? No, don't tell me! You've heard news of your friend, what's her name, Pascale?”

  Palmiro nodded. “I...I needed to talk, sir. She's been sent to some kind of punishment camp. Do you know what and where that is?”

  Adorno’s glittering eyes held his apprentice in a prolonged look, something very unusual for him.

  “I need to show you something, Palmiro. Once you have seen it and heard my explanation you will perhaps feel less inclined to worry about your friend. Or, at least, you may have some sense of a way out. Come with me.”

  He beckoned and brought Palmiro through a door he had never entered before. It led down a paneled corridor toward the back of the building, passing through the kitchen area and finally to a boot room. At the back of this Adorno opened another door and suddenly the old-world elegance of the mansion was changed into a bright hi-tech environment. A long featureless corridor built of white acrylic and permanently lit by recessed lighting stretched in front of them. Several doors led off it and Adorno explained their meaning as they went along.

  “These are all workshops and labs on either side. They contain a lot of material and equipment, materials, bio-forms, machine tools, all that kind of thing. A great deal of it is needed for the work I am going to show you. The first place on the tour is just up here.”

  He continued along the corridor as it swung through a curve, then straightened and ran fifty meters further. Half way along on the right there was a large door with a security scanning device next to it. Adorno put his eye to it and after a moment a green light showed and there was a click as the door unlocked. He swung it open and he and Palmiro entered a cavernous room filled with large screen monitors, clustered cables, banks of computers and a huge free-standing transparent panel containing a holographic map. There was a dry warmth with the distinctive odor of electrical components, and a background buzz of cooling fans and hiss of radio static. The impression was that nothing in here was ever switched off.

  “This is my observatory control, terminals from the radio telescopes and processing for their signals. The dishes are out on the hillside. I operate them from here and record their data.” Then with a slowly deliberate release of breath he added, “And I have been observing and recording day after day for over four hundred years, according to the solar calendar.”

  “You're saying, sir, that for four hundred years you have been coming in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Of course, Palmiro. I want you to know what I have been working on during all these extraordinary years the fates have allowed. I have been recording the radio wave frequencies of galaxies and their observable stars. I have been building a kind of inventory of the universe, a data-base of what might be called signature tunes of the cosmos. Let me show you.”

  He took him over to the holograph screen which was covered in globes, planes, axes, letters and numbers. “Before the storms destroyed our world, scientists had succeeded in creating an increasingly sophisticated three dimensional map of the known universe. See here...” And he twisted the space with his fingers, and it changed orientation. He made a flicking movement and it rushed sideways into an entirely different quadrant. He pushed it slightly and it plunged down into a vast abyss of new objects and surfaces.

  “Each of the objects on this map is a source of radio signals and other wavelengths of the spectrum. Over these long years I have gone on great quests throughout the universe, researching and analyzing these signals.”

  Palmiro was astounded. “You have been assembling a record of signals from across the whole universe?”

  “Yes, that is exactly right.” Perhaps for the first time in their acquaintance Adorno smiled. A kind of smile at least. “But it's what happens to the information, how it may be used, that's what's really important. For that reason I eventually narrowed my researches to one galaxy, Andromeda. I decided it was this spiral galaxy, a relatively close neighbor of a trillion stars, which exactly suited my purpose.”

  Adorno's eyes were no longer hooded. They had abandoned their hollows and were now poised and bending like hawks, directly and forcefully on Palmiro. Palmiro was unnerved and for the moment his concern for Pascale was driven from his head. He repeated Adorno's last statement hypnotically, as a question: “Andromeda suited your purpose?”

  Adorno continued to fix him with his stare, a man savoring his secret before the moment when at last he must reveal it. He said, “There is one more thing to show you. Come with me.”

  He led his pupil out of the radio telescope room, with the security door clicking shut behind them. They continued along the glaring white corridor a dozen or so meters to where it suddenly came to an end at a further large door. The entrance was controlled by another retinal scanning device and also this time a fingerprint reader. Adorno followed the steps and finally pulled an electronic key from a lanyard round his neck and poked it in a slot under the scanner. The door made a number of heavy clicks and swung open revealing well-lit steps leading downward. Palmiro had never seen his teacher more eager, so unlike his usual acerbic self. The stairs descended through a left turn into a big vault which at once felt cool and dry.

  As they turned into the room Adorno stopped abruptl
y, almost making Palmiro stumble. His hands were slightly spread from his sides and this gesture, together with what presented itself before them, made Palmiro's hair stand on end. There was a large upholstered chair, like a throne, in the middle of the room, with a harness hanging on the back. Above it, attached to a huge cantilevered frame, was a metal half-sphere about four feet in diameter with thousands of transparent fibers shooting from its gleaming surface and a padded helmet-shaped niche suspended on its underside.

  The transparent cables were swept up on either hemisphere into huge bundles which went snaking off behind and the whole thing was ensconced in layered shields or baffles, like a distended artichoke surrounding a great freak-haired cranium. At once it was obvious that whoever sat in the chair would have this monstrous skull attached. Around the spacious walls were high metal stacks filled with what looked like computers and where all the cables were plugged in. There was almost no sound and only one or two flickering activity lights gave any sign there was power connected to the machines. After a moment Adorno turned back and faced Palmiro. He seemed to be trembling and was still holding up both hands.

  “It is the Hyperbrain. I built it many, many years ago, and a day hasn't gone but I dream of putting it to use. It is what sustains me, what makes my life worthwhile. But the time has come to share it with someone else, and it is to you I am according that incredible privilege. This machine is the first step toward the next human revolution, so much bigger than immortality. But forgive me, of course, you are confused. I have to slow down and explain.”

  He stepped over toward the chair and its suspended metal crown and his gaunt body seemed to express a deep reverence, almost as if there was someone already sitting there and he was advancing toward a king or a deity.

  “I created this computer-brain interface by bringing together electronic imaging and neural signals. Electron waves are able to produce very precise mapping of brain activity. They can also be made to detect extremely minute changes in brain electrical current. I simply took the next step and made those waves capable of recording information from specific neural pathways, and in turn uploading information to those same neurons. An extremely fast array of targeted electron waves is able both to receive and impart signals to hundreds of millions of neural clusters in the brain. By transmitting to and from these individual clusters the brain's activity can be downloaded on an external computer, or alternatively it can be reconfigured by the computer. In effect my device allows total access to the internal structure of the brain.”

  Never in his wildest imaginings had Palmiro thought of anything like this. He knew that Adorno had his secrets, but in his mind they had remained of a theoretical nature, exotic formulae of biology or physics, nothing remotely approaching the extraordinary technical construct he was showing him now. But what was its purpose? The astronomical observations from the previous room and the proximity of the two projects suggested some kind of link. An insane thought was struggling to form itself inside him but Adorno beat him to it, putting it directly in words.

  “The human brain has billions of neurons and the signaling permutations between them are virtually infinite. Initially I was going to take all the recordings of the universe and upload them to the Hyperbrain, but then I realized I would have to factor in the enormous distances of time and those would exceed simultaneous consciousness. Much better to take one galaxy in its own space and upload that, and that's what I decided, settling on Andromeda. The radio signals of the daughter of Cassiopeia can be programmed into a human brain and then that brain can bounce them back with its own distinctive signature added. If a human brain can ‘think’ all the wavelengths of the galaxy simultaneously, and its synthetic thought be beamed back to the galaxy, then effectively the galaxy will take on that person's identity.”

  Adorno drew his breath and released his resounding climax. “That person's mind will become Andromeda!”

  Palmiro was caught between believing with full faith what Adorno was saying, and thinking his teacher totally mad. What was certain was Adorno believed it, and that he, Palmiro, was now an essential part of his plan. Suddenly his mind flashed back, to another dominating figure, his jailer Guest, and how he had been employed by him to hack into the refrigeration control system. What was it with these powerful men always trying to make him part of their schemes? But Adorno was continuing to speak and he had to listen.

  “I know there are all sorts of questions going on inside you, not least whether what I am saying is too farfetched, in fact impossible. Yet think about it: the most significant function of the human brain that distinguishes it from animals, is language, the way we put together a world of artificial signs detached from immediate needs. Creating a verbal system is the human practice bar none. All I am doing is making the signals of the stars into the language of the brain, into its set of words. I will download Andromeda to the Hyperbrain and its subject, so the galaxy will become its language. It will speak the stars. It will sing them, with a trillion combinations and sequences. In all the resulting slight deflections in voltage the subject brain itself is represented, so when I broadcast the whole thing back into space the signals of the galaxy will become tuned to the Hyperbrain. Effectively it will reproduce its language, its consciousness.”

  Palmiro felt the urgent need to know where this was going in real terms. “Do you mind if I ask, sir, have you been able to test this device in any way?”

  “Excellent question, Palmiro. That is the experimental attitude I have taught you. Yes, I have used the helmet on myself to record the key configurations used for language, and my researches were extremely productive. I discovered the language pathways, and how delightfully complex, almost infinite they are. It is these actual pathways I will program with the star signals. But as for a direct download of the signals themselves, no, that has not been tried.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because one by one, or even a few together, they would mean very little. They all have to be downloaded at once if they are to create a universal language. And in that scenario I am not sure whether the test subject would survive the exercise. You understand, it will involve the scrubbing of a great deal of present memory, the stuff we need to get by every day. But for the purpose of the Hyperbrain, all that is necessary is the subject survive long enough to download everything and then the new brain configuration be sent to the radio transmitters. I, of course, am planning to be that subject. I am perfectly ready for this useless flesh to die but my electrical brain activity to continue at a cosmic level.”

  Palmiro's breath was taken away. He now grasped the full dimension of Adorno's vision. His master was willing to die for it, in fact his death seemed necessary for him to reach his goal. Palmiro also understood Adorno's contempt for Sarobindo. The two men both sought the same thing, an encounter with the universe. But the yogi had created a theater of dying while the scientist planned the real thing. Yet the nagging issue of his own part was now more pressing than ever: it was obvious he, Palmiro, had an insider role in the whole thing and he did not know why, although he was getting an uneasy sense of that too.

  “Why are you telling me all this, sir?”

  Adorno was gazing at the chair and its enormous headpiece in a kind of trance. It took him a moment to return to himself. “Ah, yes, I must not forget that—the reason I am showing you all this in the first place.” And his eyes snapped back to their hawk-like fix on Palmiro.

  “Well, the fact is an evolutionary leap for humanity cannot happen unless all agree to it. Evolution is always at the level of the species, a solitary evolution is a failed evolution. Therefore, I need people to know about what I am doing, for them to be taught and accept ultimately to follow me. But that is not going to happen so long as they are obsessed with their version of immortality.”

  His eyes were a lightning strike. Palmiro almost ducked protectively but he held his glance. Then, all at once, the interview was over.

  “That is all. Please return to your studies and cons
ider carefully everything I have shown you. Do not forget that you came to me expressing concern for your friend, Pascale. And most of all, do not neglect my breakthrough in biology.”

  He gestured Palmiro to the door and turned back toward the Hyperbrain, beginning to fiddle as if he were making adjustments. Palmiro turned away himself, making his way back up the stairs and out to the corridor. He traced his steps back to his study, finding his desk and collapsing into his chair. He fumbled for his notebook while he stared out the window. He could not believe what he had just witnessed.

  9. SIERRA RIDE

  Like Palmiro, Danny returned from the philosophers' banquet in a state of shock. But he lacked the guiding force of a patron like Adorno and his feelings were angry and confused. Cal, or Pascale as she now was called, for the first time seemed to have done something foolish. He could not work out what had gotten into her. She had seemed a little strange on the island but nothing like this: the way she had come right out with that stuff in front of everybody, it was asking for trouble. And the chaos at the end of the banquet, that was something new and really frightening. The crazy scientist had just made things worse and everyone had come down on Pascale. What would it mean for her?

  Eboni tried to reassure Danny, confident that Jonas would smooth things out and everything would be fine. Within a couple of days, however, they got the news about Pascale’s arrest and Danny was thrown into despair. He'd heard the stories about Magus and it did not take a genius to understand now there would be no way back. He and Eboni could not talk. He had always loved Pascale, probably more than anyone else, he just had not been good at demonstrating it. How would he ever again get a chance to show her? Over and over he wondered where Magus' place was, where they had taken her. He asked Eboni but she shrugged helplessly, waving in a southerly direction and saying that was all anybody knew, or wanted to know.