The Pritcher Mass

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Meditate . . . "Think'st thou my name, but once thou art there . . ." The ghost of a song-fragment sounded unbidden in the back of Chaz' mind. Eileen ...

  Marti was standing up and extend­ing his hand. Chaz rose and shook hands with the Director again.

  "All right," said Marti. "Jai will get you started. Good luck."

  "Thanks," said Chaz.

  He followed Jai out the door. They passed through the outer office where Ethrya was still reciting num­bers and directions into her communications equipment. They left and took an elevator tube up.

  "Want to see your quarters now?" Jai asked, as they floated upward on the elevator disk. "Or would you rather take a look at the Mass, first?"

  "The Mass, of course—" Chaz stared at the slim man. "You mean I can go to it right away, like this?"

  "That's right," Jai smiled. "For that matter, you could try to go to work right away, if you wanted to. But I'd advise against it. It's better to have some experience of what it feels like up there on top, before you try doing anything about it."

  "Go to work?" Chaz decided that the other man was serious. "How could I go to work? I don't even know what I'm supposed to do, much less how to do it."

  "Well," said Jai, as the various levels slipped by outside the trans­parent tube of the elevator shaft, "those are things no one can help you with. You're going to have to work them out for yourself. You see, they're different for everyone who works on the Mass. Everyone has a different experience up there; and each person has to find out how to work with it in his own way. As Leb said, this is creative work, like paint­ing, composing or writing. No one can teach you how to do it."

  "How do I learn, then?"

  "You fumble around until you teach yourself, somehow." Jai shrugged. "You might just possibly learn how the minute you set foot on the deck. But if you're still trying three months from now that'll be closer to the average experience." "There must be something you can tell me," Chaz said. The unusual nervous excitement he had felt from the moment he had arrived was building inside him to new peaks, as their disk carried them closer and closer to the Mass itself.

  Jai shook his head.

  "You'll find out how it is, once you've discovered your own way of working with the Mass," he said. "You'll know how you do it, then, but what you know won't be any­thing you can explain to anyone else. The best tip I can give you is not to push. Relax and let what happens, happen. You can't force yourself to learn, you know. You just have to go along with your own reactions and emotions until you find yourself tak­ing hold instinctively."

  Their disk stopped. Above them the tube ended in ceiling. Jai led Chaz from it out into a very large room filled with construction equip­ment; and the two of them got into airsuits from a rack near a further elevator.

  Suited, they took the further ele­vator up through the ceiling over­head. Their ride ended in a small windowless building with an air lock.

  "Brace yourself," said Jai to Chaz over the suit phones; and led the way out of the air lock.

  Chaz was unclear as to how he might have been supposed to brace himself, but it turned out that this did not matter. No matter how he might have tried to prepare himself for what he encountered on the out­side, airless deck, he realized later, it would not have helped.

  He stepped into a great metal plain roofed with a dome of brilliant stars seemingly upheld by the faintly lighted, gleaming pillars of the metal masts. It was as he had seen it pic­tured in books. But the ghostly shape of a great construction crane was not superimposed on it. Instead, his imagination saw the elevator cages on the masts and the cars on the metal cables as part of his favorite image of seed crystals on threads im­mersed in a nutrient solution. For a moment, almost, he convinced him­self he saw the Mass itself, like a great, red ferrocyanide crystal, grow­ing in the midst of all this.

  "This way," Jai's voice was saying in his earphones; and Jai's grip on his airsuited arm was leading him to the base of the nearest mast, into a metal elevator cage there barely big enough to hold them both at the same time.

  They entered the cage. Jai's gloved hands touched a bank of controls, and the cage began to slide swiftly and silently up the mast. As the deck dropped away beneath them, the ex­citement in Chaz, the perception of an additional dimension, shot up toward unbearability. All at once it seemed they were out of sight of the deck, high among the stars and the masts, with the softly-lit silver cables looping between them; and without warning the whole impact of the Mass came crashing in upon Chaz at once.

  It poured over and through him like a tidal flood. Suddenly, the whole universe seemed to touch him at once; and he was swept away and drowning in a depthless sadness, a sadness so deep he would not have believed it was possible. It cascaded over him like the silent but deafen­ing music of some great, inconceiv­able orchestra, each note setting up a sympathetic vibration in every cell of his body.

  Consciousness began to leave him under the emotional assault. He was vaguely aware of slumping, of being caught by Jai and upheld as the other man reached out with one hand to slap the control panel of the cage. They reversed their motion, rocking back down the mast. But the silent orchestra pursued them, thun­dering all about and through Chaz, shredding his feelings with great, voiceless chords.

  An unbearable sadness for all of mankind overwhelmed him—agony for all its bright rise, its foolish errors that had lead to its present failure, and its stumbling, falling, plunging down now toward extinction ...

  Sorrow racked him—for Earth, for his people, for everything he had known and loved.

  Eileen . . . Eileen Mortvain ...

  . . . And the great silent orchestra picked up the name, roaring into the melody that went with the words he was remembering: ". . . Think'st thou my name, but once thou art there . . ."

  "Eileen," he muttered, upheld by Jai, "Eileen . . ."

  "Chaz?" Out of the orchestra sound, out of the Mass, the unimag­inable dimension of the universe he had just discovered, and the sorrow and tragedy of the murdered Earth, he heard her voice calling.

  ". . . Chaz? Are you there? Can you hear me? Chaz . . .?"

  VIII

  He opened his eyes, wondering where he was. Then he recognized the white-paneled ceiling three me­ters above him as the ceiling of the bedroom in the spacious quarters that had been assigned him at the Mass. It had been five days now since his arrival and he was not yet accustomed to having three large, high-ceilinged rooms all to himself.

  He became conscious, almost in the same moment as that in which he identified the ceiling, of an addi­tional weight sharing the mattress on which he lay. Out here on the Mass, waterbeds were impractical; and the spring mattresses carried signals once the sleeper got used to them. He turned his head and saw Ethrya perched on the edge of his bed.

  She was smiling down at him. It had not occurred to him, here on the Mass, to lock his apartment door, so that there was no mystery about how she could be here. Why, was some­thing else again.

  "You're awake at last," she said. "What's up?" he asked.

  "I'm about to go out on the Mass on one of my own work shifts there," she answered. "Leb suggested you might want to go along with me. Sometimes it helps someone new if they spend a shift outside with an­other person who's already found out how to work with the Mass."

  "Oh," he said.

  She sat on the edge of the bed level with his right hip as he lay on his back, and she was only inches from him. Since that first moment in which he had heard Eileen's voice out on the Mass, he had not been able to achieve any contact with Ei­leen again; but she had been in his mind constantly. Nonetheless—for all of Eileen—to come up out of drowsy sleep and find a startlingly beautiful small woman close beside him was to experience an unavoid­able, instinctive response.

  Even seen this close up, Ethrya's beauty was flawless. She wore cov­eralls as just about everyone did, on the Mass. But those she was wearing at the moment were white, and they fitted her very well. The somewhat s
tiff material pressed close to her at points, but stood away from her at others, with a faintly starched look—so that looking at her it was easy to imagine her body moving inside the clothing. The coveralls were open at the throat and above the collar her black hair set off the ivory of her skin, giving her face a cameo look. There was a faint, clean smell to her.

  "Were you married?" she asked Chaz, now.

  He shook his head, watching her. "Oh?" she said. "I wondered. Jai said you spoke the name of some woman that first day when you col­lapsed, up top. Who was it, if it wasn't a wife?"

  Instinctively, through remnants of sleep that still fogged his mind, his early years of experience at defend­ing himself among his aunt and cousins shouted a warning. Without pausing to search out the reasons for it, he lied immediately, smoothly, and convincingly.

  "My aunt," he said. "She raised me after my father died. My mother was already dead."

  She stared down into his face for a moment.

  "Well," she said, "an aunt. That dossier Leb got on you said some­thing about you being a loner. But I didn't think it was that seri­ous."

  She slipped off the bed and stood up. There was no doubt from the way she did it that she was physically taking herself away from him. And yet, she was still within a long arm's reach. Chaz had a sudden strong im­pulse to reach out and haul her back; and only the same instinct that had spoken earlier—this time, however, telling him that doing so would be to do exactly what she wanted from him—stopped him.

  Instead, he lay there and looked at her.

  "Anybody entitled to read that dossier of mine, are they?" he asked.

  "Of course not," she said. "Only Leb. But I work in the office part of the time. I thought I'd take a look." She looked down at him for a sec­ond, smiling faintly. "How about it? Want to meet me in the dining area in about twenty minutes, and we'll go out on the Mass together?"

  "Fine," he said. "Thanks."

  "Don't mention it."

  She turned and walked out. She managed to make a work of art even out of that.

  Left alone, Chaz levered himself out of bed, showered—a cold shower—and dressed. Wearing gray coveralls, he took the elevator down to the dining area on the third level. Ethrya was waiting for him at one of the small tables.

  "Better eat something, if you haven't in the last few hours, before we go up," she said.

  "Breakfast," he agreed, sitting down. "How about you?"

  "I had lunch an hour ago," Ethrya answered. Sleeping and eating and working schedules were highly indi­vidual on the Mass. "I'll just sit here and keep you company."

  He got his tray of food from the dispenser and dug into it. Ethrya sat chatting about work on the Mass. Upstairs here, in public, there were none of the earlier signals of sex wafting from her. She was cheerful, brisk and impersonal—and the contrast with the way she had appeared down in his bedroom made her more enticing than ever. Chaz concentrated on being just as friendly and brisk.

  "You aren't going to be able to work with the Mass," she said, "until you've become able to sense its pat­tern. It does have a pattern, you know. The fact that no two of the workers describe it the same way makes no difference. The pattern's there, and once you can feel it, you'll be ready to start figuring out what needs to be added to it to make it whole. Once you fully conceive of an addition you'll find it's been added to the Mass—not only in the pattern as you see it, but in the pattern of ev­eryone else who's working on it."

  Chaz thought of his own image of a nutrient solution with a great red crystal growing in it. He swallowed a mouthful of omelet.

  "All subjective, then?" he asked.

  "Very subjective," she said.

  He managed another mouthful, while mentally debating something he wanted to ask her. He decided to ask it.

  "How do you see the Mass?" he asked.

  "Like an enormous bear," she an­swered promptly. "A friendly bear—white, like a polar bear. He's sitting up the way bears do. Maybe you've seen them do it in zoos. They sit with their back up straight and their hind legs straight out before them. He sits like that among the stars, half as big as the universe; and he stretches out one foreleg straight from the shoul­der, pointing at whatever I want. All I have to do is walk out along that foreleg to get to anyplace this side of infinity."

  Chaz watched her as she talked. "Have you?" he asked.

  "I came close, once," she an­swered. "There're a number of us who've had glimpses of the kind of world we're looking for. The trouble is, my bear isn't finished, yet; and until he's finished, he isn't strong enough to keep that foreleg held out straight while I locate the world he's helped me get to. Or, at least, that's the shape the problem takes for me, when I work upstairs."

  "A bear," he said, finishing up the omelet, "that's strange. I thought ev­eryone would think of the Mass as something mechanical."

  "A number of the workers see it as something alive," Ethrya said. "Most of the women here do—what there are of them."

  He glanced at her, curiously.

  "You sound a little old-fash­ioned," he said. "I thought all that about equality got settled in the last century."

  "Look around you," she said. "The men outnumber us five to one up here."

  "Maybe that's the way the talent for chain-perception distributes it­self?"

  "You know better. The old system still operates. There're plenty of women with the talent to work here," Ethrya's dark eyes glittered, "but they've had the guts choked out of them. They'd rather stay where they are and play their little witch ­games—even if Earth is a dead end."

  Chaz carefully lifted his coffee cup and drank from it without looking at her, and carefully put the cup down. Then he looked at her. Her face was perfectly pleasant and serene.

  "You'd know more about it than I would," he said.

  "I would indeed," she said cheer­fully. "Now, are you ready for the Mass?"

  He nodded. They got up, left the dining area, and took the elevator to the top level. Ten minutes later they were out on the deck in their airsuits, walking clumsily side by side toward a cage at the foot of one of the masts.

  "Keep your suit phone open on my circuit," her voice said in his ear­phones. "That way I'll be able to hear anything you say. Usually, if people begin to hallucinate here on the Mass, they talk or make some kind of sound that gives it away."

  "Hallucinate?" he echoed, as they fitted themselves into the cage and began to rise up the mast. "Is that supposed to be what happened to me the first day?"

  "Of course," she said. "What else?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I just didn't think of it as a hallucination."

  "Oh, yes," she said. "It happens all the time, even after you've learned how to work up top. You were just lucky it wasn't a bad one—like the universe going all twisted and crazy. In a strict sense, the Mass isn't even real, you know. Any characteristics it has are things our minds give it. It's all subjective around here. You start getting hallucinations that are really bad and Leb'll have to take you off the work up here."

  "I see," he answered.

  "Don't worry about it. How do you feel now?"

  "I don't feel anything," he said. It was true. Since that first day he had been back up on the Mass a half-dozen times, and each time there had been no more to it than clump­ing around in an airsuit and riding mast elevator cages and cable cars through airless space.

  "If you start to feel anything, let me know," she told him. "Actually, there're two things here. The Mass itself and the force of the Mass. So, you do want to feel something—the Mass-force pushing against you. But you want to control that push, meter it down to a force you can handle, so it doesn't overwhelm you the way it did the first time."

  Their cage stopped at a cable. They got out and transferred to a cable car, which began to slide out along the cable into a void in which they seemed all but surrounded by stars.

  "What would happen if you learned how to manage the full force without metering it down to some­thing
smaller?" he asked.

  "You couldn't take it," her voice answered within his helmet. "We've had a few people who couldn't learn how to meter it down and they all col­lapsed, eventually. That's when the hallucinations start getting bad, when the full flow can't be controlled. You can blow your mind out, then."

  Chaz stowed that information away in his mental attic, together with a perceptible grain of salt. He would discover his own truths about the Mass, he decided, for himself and at first hand.

  "The thing is," the purely human voice of Ethrya sounded tiny and un­natural, coming over the earphones of Chaz' suit, "to take it as gently as possible. Just sit back and let the force of the Mass seep into you, if that's the word. How do you feel now?"

  "Fine," said Chaz.

  "Good." She stopped the cage in mid-cable. "I'm ready to go to work now. If you pick up any feeling from me, or from the Mass-force, speak up. Maybe I can help you with it—or maybe not. But check anyway." "All right," Chaz said.

  He sat back in his airsuit. Silence fell. Beside him, Ethrya was equally silent. He wondered if she was al­ready walking out along the out­stretched forelimb of her enormous bear. How long would it take her, in her mind, to walk the light-years of distance from his shoulder to wher­ever she believed he was pointing?

  Chaz tried to put his mind on the Mass; but the female presence of Ethrya alongside him interfered, in spite of the double wall of airsuiting between them. His mind went back to Eileen. It had been no hallucina­tion, that voice of hers he had heard, on his first day here. He might be open to argument on other points about the Mass; but on that one he had no doubt. He and Eileen had been in contact for at least a few sec­onds, thanks to the Mass; and what had been done once could be done again.

  . . . If, that was, he could only get once more into touch with the Mass itself. A small cold fear stirred inside him. The possibility of hallucina­tions did not worry him; but Jai had talked of three months or more of ef­fort before Chaz might learn to work with the Mass. How much time would they actually be willing to give to learn? Somewhere . . . he be­gan to search through the attic of his memory . . . he had read something about those who after six months or so could not learn to work. They were not sent back to Earth. Like those Ethrya had been talking about, who could not stand up emotionally or mentally to contact with the Mass, they were kept on as administrative personnel. But administrative per­sonnel were never allowed up here on the deck.