Watson-Smythe moved to the utility cupboard and set some water to boil, idly whistling a tune by Haydn. While waiting, he glanced through the window at speeding galaxies, then crossed to the velocitator control board and peered at the speedometer, tapping at the glass-covered dial.
‘Will we get there soon, do you think? Is 186 your top speed?’
‘We could do nearly 300, if pushed,’ Naylor said. ‘But any faster than 186 and we’d probably go past the target area without noticing it.’
‘Ah, that wouldn’t do at all, would it?’
The kettle whistled. Watson-Smythe rushed to it and busied himself with warming the teapot, brewing the tea and pouring it, after a proper interval, into bone-china cups.
Naylor accepted a cup, but declined a share of the toast and marmalade which Watson-Smythe prepared for himself.
‘This fellow Corngold,’ he asked hesitantly while his guest ate, ‘is he much of an artist?’
Watson-Smythe looked doubtful. ‘Couldn’t say, really. Don’t know much about it myself. Don’t know Corngold personally either, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh.’ Naylor’s curiosity was transient, and he didn’t like to pry.
Watson-Smythe waggled a finger at the thespitron, which was still playing out its black-and-white shadow show (Naylor had deliberately eschewed colour; monochrome seemed to impart a more bare-boned sense of drama). ‘Got the old telly going again, I see – the automated telly. You ought to put that into production, old chap. It would be a boon to habitat travellers. Much better than carrying a whole library of play-back tapes.’
‘Yes, I dare say it would.’
‘Not in the same class as this other project of yours, if it comes off, of course. That will be something.’
Naylor smiled in embarrassment. He almost regretted having told his companion about the scheme he was working on. It was, possibly, much too ambitious.
After his breakfast Watson-Smythe disappeared back into his bedroom to practise callisthenics – though Naylor couldn’t imagine what anyone so obsessed with keeping trim was doing space-travelling. Habitat life, by its enclosed nature, was not conducive to good health.
His passenger’s presence could be what had been blocking his progress, Naylor thought. After all, he had come out here for solitude, originally.
He switched on the vodor again and settled down to try to put his thoughts back on the problem once more.
‘The modern dilemma (continued the vodor) is perhaps admirably expressed in an ancient Buddhist tale. An enlightened master one day announced to his disciples that he wished to enter into contemplation. Reposing himself, he closed his eyes and withdrew his consciousness.
‘For thirty years he remained thus, while his disciples took care of his body and kept it clean.
‘At the end of thirty years he opened his eyes and looked about him. The disciples gathered around. “Can the noble master tell us,” they asked, “what has engaged his attention all this time?” The master told them: “I have been considering whether, in all the deserts of the world, there could conceivably be two grains of sand identical in every particular.’
‘The disciples were puzzled. “Surely,” they said, “that is a small matter to monopolise the attention of a mind such as yours?”
‘“Small it may be, but it was too great for me,” the master replied. “I still do not know the answer.”
‘In the twentieth century a striking scientific use of the concept of identity seemed for a while to cut across many logical and philosophical definitions and to answer the Buddhist master’s question. In order to handle paradoxical findings resulting from experiments in electron diffraction, equations were devised which, in mathematical terms, removed from electrons their individual identities. It was pointed out that electrons are all so alike as to be, for all intents and purposes, identical. The equations therefore described electrons as exchanging identities with one another in a rhythmic oscillation, without any transfer of energy or position …’
Naylor’s first love had been logic machines. As a boy he had begun by reconstructing the early devices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the deceptively simple Stanhope Demonstrator invented by an English earl, which with its calibrated window and two cursors was probably the very first genuine logic machine (though working out the identities was a tedious business); the Jevons Logic Machine (the first to solve complicated problems faster than the unaided logician) which in common with Venn diagrams made use of the logic algebra of George Boole. He had quickly progressed to the type of machine developed in the twentieth century and known generically as the ‘computer’, although only later had it developed into an instrument of pure logic for its own sake. By the time he was twenty he had become fully conversant with proper ‘thinking machines’ able to handle multi-valued logic, and had begun to design models of his own. His crowning achievement, a couple of years ago, had been the construction of what he had reason to believe was the finest logic machine ever, a superb instrument embracing the entire universe of discourse.
It was then that he had conceived the idea of the thespitron, a device which if marketed would without doubt put all writers of dramatic fiction out of business for once and all. Its basic hardware consisted of the above-mentioned logic machine, plus a comprehensive store and various ancillaries. After his past efforts, he had found the arrangement surprisingly easy to accomplish. In appearance the machine resembled an over-large, old-fashioned television set, with perhaps rather too many controls; but whereas an ordinary television receiver picked up its programmes from some faraway transmitter, the thespitron generated them internally. Essentially it was a super-plotting device; it began with bare logical identities, and combined and recombined them into ever more complex structures, until by this process it was able to plot an endless variety of stories and characters, displaying them complete with dialogue, settings and incidental music.
Naylor had watched the plays and films generated by the thespitron for several months now, and he could pronounce himself well pleased with the result of his labours. The thespitron was perpetual motion: because the logical categories could be permutated endlessly, its dramatic inventiveness was inexhaustible. Left to its own devices, it would eventually run through all possible dramatic situations.
Naylor had once heard a theological speculation that, laying aside his own philosophical training, he thought was lent added piquancy by the existence of the thespitron. The speculation was that God had created the universe for its theatrical content alone, simply in order to be able to view the innumerable dramatic histories it generated. According to this notion all ethical parameters, all poignancies, triumphs, tragedies and meaningless sufferings were, so to speak, literary devices.
The thespitron, Naylor reasoned, repeated this situation exactly. For was it not a private cosmic theatre? The cosmos in miniature, complete in itself, self-acting, consistent with its own logical laws just as the greater cosmos was? The idea that the thespitron had some sort of cosmic significance was made even more alluring by its present location here in intergalactic space, googols of light years from Earth. Here, too, was the miniature cosmos’s creator and the observer of its presentations – Naylor himself, who was thus pleasingly elevated to the status of a god.
The perverse amusement he derived from this thought did not affect him seriously. Theological notions were all crude and simplistic to a man of education. But even with the redundant God-concept left out of account the Spectatorist Myth was interesting enough, leading to the idea of the universe interpreted as a logic of theatre – which was, after all, what he had achieved in the thespitron. Mulling over this idea brought a fascinating, compelling vision to the recesses of Naylor’s mind. He imagined, at the source of existence, a transcendental logic machine – preternatural archetype of his own – which ground out the categories of logical identity in pure form; he saw the categories passing down a dark, immensely long corridor, combining and recombining as they went, until e
ventually they permutated into concrete substance – or in other words, into the physical universe and all its contents.
But even as he entertained this image Naylor smiled, shaking his head, reminding himself how corrupting to philosophy were all such idealist fancies. He was well aware of how fallacious it was to imagine that logic was antecedent to matter.
Philisophically Naylor held fast to the tradition of British empiricism (while not descending, of course, to American pragmatism) and saw himself very much as a child of the nineteenth century, harbouring a nostalgic fondness for the flavour of thought of that period – though the outlook of J. S. Mill had been much updated, naturally, by the thoroughgoing materialist empiricists of Naylor’s own time. He eschewed the manic systems-building of the continentals and was suspicious of any lapse into idealist formulations (such as ‘rationalism’) all of which ended up sooner or later in some version of the hysterical ‘world-soul’ doctrine.
In his attachment to nineteenth-century values Naylor was typical of his time. Most of his fellow Englishmen were equally proud to think of themselves as products of the great Victorian age, for in recent decades there had been a genuine and far-reaching renaissance in the qualities that had given that period its vigour. The Victorians, with their prolific inventiveness, their love of ‘projects’, their advocacy of ‘progress’ combined with an innate and rigid conservatism, embodied, it was commonly believed, all that was best in civilisation. And indeed it was hard to imagine any period more closely resembling the age of England’s Great Queen than the present one.
As often happens, economic forces were in some measure responsible for the change. During the twenty-first century it had gradually become apparent that the advantages of global trade were finally being outweighed by the disadvantages. The international division of labour was taking on the aspect, not of a constant mutual amelioration of life, but of a destructive natural force which could impoverish entire peoples. The notion of economic progress came to take on another meaning: to signify, not the ability to dominate world markets, but the means by which a small nation might become wealthy without any foreign trade whatsoever. Britain, always a pioneer, was the first to discover this new direction. With the help of novel technologies she reversed what had been axiomatic since the days of Adam Smith, and for a time was once again the wealthiest power on Earth, aloof from the world trade storm, reaping through refusal to trade all the benefits she had once gained through trade.
It was a time of innovation, of surprising, often fantastic invention, of which the Harkham Velocitator, a unit of which was now powering Naylor’s habitat through infinity, was perhaps the outstanding example. The boffin had come into his own again, outwitting the expensively equipped teams of professional research scientists. Yet in some respects it was a cautious period, alert to the dangers of too precipitous a use of every new-fangled gadget, and keeping alive the spirit of the red flag that once had been required to precede every horseless carriage. For that reason advantage was not always taken of every advance in productive methods.
Two devisements in particular were forbidden. The first was the hylic potentiator, an all-purpose domestic provider commonly known as the matter-bank. This worked by holding in store a mass of amorphous, non-particulate matter, or hyle, to use the classical term. Hylic matter from this store could be instantly converted into any object, artifact or substance for which the machine was programmed, and returned to store if the utility was no longer needed or had not been consumed. Because the hylic store consisted essentially of a single gigantic shaped neutron, very high energies were involved, which had led to the device being deemed too dangerous for use on Earth. Models were still to be found here and there in space, however.
The second banned production method was a process whereby artifacts were able to reproduce themselves after the manner of viruses if brought into contact with simple materials. The creation of self-replicating artifacts had become subject to world prohibition after the islands of Japan became buried beneath ever-growing mounds of still-multiplying TV sets, audvid recorders, cameras, autos, motor-bikes, refrigerators, helicopters, pocket computers, transistor radios, portphones, light aeroplanes, speedboats, furniture, sex aids, hearing aids, artificial limbs and organs, massage machines, golf clubs, zip fasteners, toys, typewriters, graphic reproduction machines, electron microscopes, house plumbing and electrical systems, machine tools, industrial robots, earthmovers, drilling rigs, prefabricated dwellings, ships, submersibles, fast-access transit vehicles, rocket-launchers, lifting bodies, extraterrestrial exploration vehicles, X-ray machines, radio, video, microwave, X-ray and laser transmitters, modems, reading machines, and innumerable other conveniences.
Of all innovations, however, the invention to have most impact on the modern British mind was undoubtedly the Harkham velocitator, which had abolished the impediment of distance and opened up infinity to the interested traveller. Theoretically the velocitator principle could give access to any velocity, however high, except one: it was not possible to travel a measured distance in zero time, or an infinite distance in any measured time. But in practice, a velocitator unit’s top speed depended on the size of its armature. After a while designing bigger and bigger armatures had become almost a redundant exercise. Infinity was infinity was infinity.
Velocitator speeds were expressed in powers of the velocity of light. Thus 186, Naylor’s present pace, indicated the speed of light multiplied by itself 186 times. Infinity was now littered, if littered was a word that could be predicated of such a concept, with velocitator explorers, most of them British, finding in worlds without end their darkest Africas, their South American jungles, their Tibets and Outer Mongolias.
In point of fact the greater number of them did precious little exploring. Infinity, as it turned out, was not as definable as Africa. Early on the discovery had been made that until one actually arrived at some galaxy or planet, infinite space had a soothing, prosaic uniformity (provided one successfully avoided the matterless lakes), a bland sameness of fleeting mushy glints. It was a perfect setting for peace and solitude. This, perhaps, as much as the outward urge, had drawn Englishmen into the anonymous universe. The velocitator habitat offered a perfect opportunity to ‘get away from it all’, to find a spot of quiet, possibly, to work on one’s book or thesis, or to avoid some troublesome social or emotional problem.
This was roughly Naylor’s position. The success of the thespitron had emboldened him to consider taking up the life of an inventor. He had ventured into the macrocosm to mull over, in its peace and silence, a certain stubborn technical problem which velocitator travel itself entailed.
The problem had been advertised many times, but so far it had defeated all attempts at a solution. It was, quite simply, the problem of how to get home again. Every Harkham traveller faced the risk of becoming totally, irrevocably lost, it being impossible to maintain a sense of direction over the vast distances involved. The scale was simply too large. Space bent and twisted, presenting, in terms of spatial curvature, mountains and mazes, hills and serpentine tunnels. A gyroscope naturally followed this bending and twisting; all gyroscopic compasses were therefore useless. Neither, on such a vast and featureless scale, was there any possibility of making a map.
(Indeed a simple theorem showed that large-scale sidereal mapping was inherently an untenable proposition. Mapping consists of recording relationships between locations or objects. In a three-dimensional continuum this is only really practicable by means of data storage. However, the number of possible relationships between a set of objects rises exponentially with the number of objects. The number of possible connections between the 10,000 million neurons of the human brain actually exceeds the number of particles within Olbers’ Sphere (which, before the invention of the velocitator, was thought of as the universe). Obviously no machine, however compact, could contain the information necessary to map the relationships between objects whose number was without limit, even when those objects were entire gal
axies.)
Every velocitator habitat carried a type of inertial navigation recording system, which enabled the traveller to retrace his steps and, hopefully, arrive back at the place he had started from. This, to date, was the only homing method available; but the device was delicate and occasionally given to error – only a small displacement in the inertial record was enough to turn the Milky Way Galaxy into an unfindable grain of sand in an endless desert. Furthermore, Harkham travellers were apt, sometimes unwittingly, to pass through powerful magnetic fields which distorted and compromised the information on their recorders, or even wiped the tapes clean.
Naylor’s approach to the problem was, as far as he knew, original. He had adopted a concept that both philosophy and science had at various times picked up, argued over, even used, then dropped again only to resume the argument later: the concept of identity.
If every entity, object and being had its own unique identity which differentiated it from the rest of existence, then Naylor reasoned that it ought to be uniquely findable in some fictive framework that was independent of space, time and number. Ironically the theoretical tools he was using were less typical of empiricist thought than of its traditional enemy, rationalism, the school that saw existence as arising, not from material occasions, but from abstract categories and identities; but he was sufficiently undogmatic not to be troubled by that. He was aware that empirical materialists had striven many times to argue away the concept of identity altogether, but they had never, quite, succeeded.
Naylor imagined each individual object resulting from a combining, or focusing together, of universal logic classes (or universal identities), much as the colour components of a picture are focused on to one another to form a perfect image. It was necessary to suppose that each act of focusing was unique, that is to say, that each particle of matter was created only once. It would mean, for instance, that each planet had a unique identity: that a sample of iron from the Earth was subtly different from a sample of iron taken from the Moon, and it was this difference that Naylor’s projected direction-finder would be able to locate.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 45
