by Brian N Ball
Garvins face appeared momentarily, a huge and distorted mask of horror: a look that the watchers knew to be contorted by a knowledge of the ultimate truth. The girl was screaming now in sheer terror of this sight.
Before the fields of force reduced them to complete bewilderment, they heard Henry Sokutu pleading for information: “I must know! What is he seeing? What can you make of it? Is it the Key? Do they create a way to—”
In a moment of lucidity, Del recalled Henry Sokutus words. The final moment would be completely shocking. It would reveal what time was; what life was; what creation meant. Garvin was seeing into the beginnings of it. And Del would have to face it: he would be like the child born with a damaged brain who at the moment of death realizes what life could have been—and then there would be nothing else, at least for the child. But Del might five afterwards. After living through the terrifying and glittering moment as the mandala imploded, he would have to remember: seize on to the meaning and carry it off. Not, like Smith, to be shocked into panic flight from the reality of the situation—
“Del, it’s forming!”
They watched, though both hardly dared to look. The girl was talking fast:
“Del, I knew today I was wrong: it wasn't you and me—we matched so well I couldn't believe it at first, it was like all that had ever been said about love, as natural as water sliding around a rock—”
Henry Sokutu had said something about her: what was it?
“But you’d forgotten me in two days!”
Garvin's body tumbled slowly end, over end.
“You look into a man's mind, and you think you're going into another universe, but what do you find? It ends, Del, there's only moments—”
Del watched the merging of the hypercubes, the fusing of the monsters into their new-created dimensions. Garvin was shouting? Calling to them? Explaining?
“—the white dwarf implosion, that’s what it is, Del,
try to– "
“He's trying to tell us how to seize on the moment! Del, it all makes sense! You pick on the time you want and freeze it!”
Del found himself talking aloud, searching again for the words:
“The monsters. Fusing.”
“I was blind and saw that you and I could be eternal, live into time, somewhere.”
“They're building up a chain of—”
“Of what?”
Momentarily, the girl had listened.
“Eternities,'’ Del told her. “A matrix of forevers. A whirl of whens. A shower of nows,”
The pattern was almost complete. Garvin was a part of it, completely absorbed at the centre of the mandala. Like a star, with a pinpoint at the centre. The mandala was in balance, the external forces finding their counterpart in the activity within. Inside, where Garvin tumbled, there was an encapsulated piece of time. The things that were shredding away in the maze had pulled forever together: Garvin was trying to tell them.
‘They’ll leave Garvin there,” said the girl. “They 11 move away and out of the mandala, and Garvin will still hang in the piece of time.”
Del nodded, unsurprised. Garvin’s message was clear enough. He didn’t question the girl’s knowledge, nor how the message came to them. Garvin had tried to explain the events in which he was so horrifyingly taking part. Simply, it was that the things, the monsters, had accomplished what they had aimed to do: they had produced an asymmetry in time, a succession of micro-states generating other micro-states. Locally, and for short periods, the appropriate micro-state was held. Each micro-state was unique: each was a specific model: each was a function of time.
What strange use had they for their creation?
There was a whisper of quiet satisfaction from the diminishing colossus. It was taking its final form now, and like decent workmen at the climax of a job well done the things were happy because their strenuous and sustained effort had been worthwhile. What had they learned? Del was sure they would never return. No more would be heard of the strangers: until a human mind found the Key?
“They’ll go back,” said the girl. “And leave Garvin locked in that piece.”
Beyond space and time they would wheel and sink away, like tides and winds: inevitably the ponderous forces would recede, leaving Garvin in their path, a useless, used item of equipment. He would be left, a molecule in the anomalous math of an imploding star. He was the Flying Dutchman, but one that no human mind could conceive of: he would circle his narrow orbit of time, live over the few minutes it would take to complete the formula, and then live them again.
And again. Forever. He was a frozen function of time.
“That’s what I want."
“No!”
“I could move into time, Del!”
She was running with power and grace across the broken ground, hair streaming, clothes shredding, almost floating into the huge and symmetrical rotating blur of the mandala. As she reached the colossus, it slowly oozed into the shape of a cone. Del watched. Loss, grief; a sense of fulfilment, though.
Suzanne Rosetti’s scream of fear rang though his mind.
Garvin welcomed another soul.
Del felt the stupendous relief as the two joined together.
The two shapes stood clear amongst a million shards of fire. Their laughter as they embraced flooded the interlocking hypercubes.
“—into Time!” yelled the joyous voice of the girl.
Diamond points only, stripped of their gross armour, the things made a last traverse of the cone, and Del knew they were going. Were they looking at the globule of time they were leaving as a memento of their experiment?
They vanished with as little flurry as the stars in the morning. Their waiting was over: they had achieved their Nirvana. Only the cycloidal capsule remained in the centre of a fading radiance. It grew smaller and sank into the complex of hypercubes that made up the universe of Garvin and the girl, a universe in thermodynamic equilibrium, a localized creation that would go on forever.
And they too were moving away. First, the mandala eased into nothing. Then the spaces inside collapsed one into another, like an eternal whirlpool: the hermaphroditic eight-limbed shape at the centre flung off into forever.
They had gone, and the bare black rocks of the cliff were in deep shadow. In the first fight of dawn, Del turned to see the squat functional mass of the drive.
He walked slowly back over the broken ground.
Winner of the HUGO Award for the
Best Science Fiction Novel of 1968!
STAND ON ZANZIBAR
John Brunner
. . . Brunner conducts himself brilliantly.”
—Judith Merril
. . . far from conventional science fiction-fantasy.”
—Publishers' Weekly
A Giant of a Book
$1.65 .............................. 650 pages!
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5¢ a copy for handling and send to Dept. CS,
Ballantine Books. 36 West 20th Street,
New York, N.Y. 10003
TIMEPIECE
In one of the most unusual Time stories to be written in recent years, Brian Ball takes the reader on a journey through the universe and produces some of the most fascinating concepts to deal with the relativity of time, and space, looking for the focal point of time itself.
He blends science and fiction in an explosively imaginative form that whirls the reader into a vortex of excitement.
But perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of this novel is that the theories expounded by the author have been checked by a noted scientist and have been declared feasible.
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