Orbitsville Departure o-1

by Bob Shaw

  "She's around somewhere," Renard said knowingly, flashing his narrow bow of teeth.

  Dallen concealed his annoyance over having his screens penetrated so easily. "Why are these people here? They can't all be theoretical physicists."

  "Metaphysicists would be more like it. Karal claims there are special particles called mindons which are harder to detect than neutrinos because they exist in what he calls mental space. It's all a bit abstruse for a mere botanist, but apparently our brains have mindon look-alikes in mental space — where most of the physical laws are different — which enable us to survive death. Karal doesn't talk about dying — he refers to it as becoming discarnate.

  "It's all supposed to be very comforting and uplifting," Renard added as he handed Dallen a clinking glass. "Personally, I prefer this stuff or an occasional dab of jinks."

  "Felicitin?" Dallen was only mildly curious. "Can you get it right here in Madison?"

  Renard shrugged. "A dealer comes through from the west coast once a month, so somebody in town must be really hooked on the stuff."

  "Who's got that kind of money?"

  "Dealers don't talk. Felicitin isn't illegal, as you know, but heavy users generally get up to some highly illegal activities sooner or later. You can sometimes spot them, though, if you know what to look for."

  Dallen sipped his drink and was a little surprised to find it had been mixed exactly to his specification. Renard was on his best behaviour. How, he wondered, would you pinpoint a person who was really dosing up on felicitin? Look out for someone who was always cool and calm, exuding that air of serene confidence…? A memory picture flickered briefly behind his eyes — tall young man with Nordic good looks, expensively tailored, relaxed, smiling. Dallen concentrated until he had identified the image as that of Gerald Mathieu, the deputy mayor, then frowned and peered into his glass as a coldness developed in his stomach.

  "I hope this isn't super cooled ice," he said. "I've heard this stuff can be bad for you."

  Renard smiled. "It's always the ice — never the booze."

  Dallen nodded, becoming aware of a man and woman purposefully moving closer to him. He turned and saw the rotund figure of Peter Ezzati, the city's salvage officer, accompanied by his equally plump wife, Libby. While they were shaking hands he noticed that the woman's eyes were following his with a kind of melting intensity and he guessed with a sinking feeling that she was a tragedy buff, a professional sympathiser.

  "Is this your first time here, Carry?" Ezzati said. "Are you enjoying it?"

  "I'm a bit vague about what fm supposed to enjoy."

  "The talk, mainly. Karal can be quite convincing about his mindons, if you follow his argument right through, but it's the conversation I like. You get guys here whose minds aren't limited to sport and sex, who can talk about anything. For instance, what do you think about these green flashes they're getting on Orbitsville?"

  Dallen was baffled. "I’m afraid I…"

  "You're the first policeman we've had at the meetings" Libby Ezzati put in, her gaze still a channel for moist compassion.

  "I'm not a policeman," Dallen explained. "I work for the Deregistration Bureau."

  Libby shot an accusing glance at her husband, as though charging him with having told her lies. "But you can arrest people, can't you?"

  "Only lor things like being on land where there's an exclusion order in force."

  "That's another thing" Ezzati said. "Is it true they're pulling the deregister line in to a forty kilometre radius of Madison?"

  Dallen nodded. "The population here is shrinking. There's enough good farming land within the radius."

  "I don't like it — it's all part of a process." Ezzati considered what he had just said and appeared to raid it significant. "All part of a process."

  "Everything is part of a process" Dallen said.

  "I'm not talking philosophy — I'm talking people."

  "You're talking piffle, darling," Libby told her husband, and having allied herself with Dallen decided it was rapport time. "You know. Carry, Kipling had a vital message for all of us when he pointed out that God never wasted a leaf or a tree…"

  "Rick is the botanist around here." Dallen walked away quickly and went back into the hall where the rematerialised holomorph of Karal London was addressing two new arrivals… discarnate mind composed of mindons interacts with matter only very weakly, but that doesn't call its existence into question. After all, we have yet to detect the graviton or the gravitino… Coming out of the beam of sound, Dallen went into the room opposite and found it populated like the one he had left, small groups standing and talking earnestly in an ambience of low-placed lights and amber drinks.

  He worked his way through them and went into the extension where yesterday morning, which seemed an aeon ago, he had first seen Silvia's incredible glass mosaic screen. The studio was empty. Diffuser lamp’s were shining behind the trefoil panels, providing a patchy illumination which obscured the design of the three universes, shading them off into a mysterious darkness suggestive of the vast tracts of the cosmos beyond the limits of human vision. Dallen found the entire construct beautiful beyond words, and again he was awed by the sheer amount of labour that it represented. His appreciation of art was untutored, a chief criterion being that a piece should appear difficult, to have taxed the artist's powers, to have been hard work — and by that standard alone the screen, with its hundreds of thousands of varicoloured glass chips, had to be the most impressive and soul-glutting creation he had ever seen.

  "It's not for sale," Silvia London said from close behind him.

  "Pity — I was going to commission a dozen." He turned and found himself warmed by her presence. Everything about her seemed right to him — the humorous intelligence in the brown eyes, the determination of the chin, the strength combined with the utter femininity of the fuli bosomed figure sheathed in a pleated white dress.

  "Perhaps I could make you a little suncatcher," she said.

  "It wouldn't be the same. Being little, I mean. It's the size of this thing — all those separate pieces of glass — which helps make it what it is."

  Silvia's lips twitched. "You're a dialectical materialist."

  "Step outside and say that," Dallen challenged. Silvia laughed and this time his arms, unbidden, actually opened a little to receive her. He froze in a turmoil of guilt and confusion. Silvia seemed to catch her breath and her eyes became troubled. "I was talking to Rick a little while ago," she said. "He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise… I didn't connect you…"

  "It's all right. It's my problem."

  She nodded thoughtfully. "I’ve heard of people making a full recovery."

  "It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…"

  Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. "Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone,"

  "I'm so sorry." Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. "Carry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?"

  "I don't mind," He said, setting his glass down.

  "Through here." Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumb printing the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster o
f delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.

  "Impressive," Dallen said. "I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed."

  "My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment," Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. "The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and micro controls even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces."

  "What's the point of it?"

  Silvia's face was solemn. "It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal."

  "I see." Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. "Proof of life after death."

  "Proof that what we call death is merely a transition."

  Dallen realised that he had to be honest. "Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?"

  "They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved."

  "No, but… I never heard of mindons before tonight, but 1 gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a… discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?" Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.

  "Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons."

  "But we don't even know that gravitons exist."

  "But, but, but!" Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. "Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?"

  "I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it," Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.

  She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles — a neutrino having just one — which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples — one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth — who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous" I'm sorry," he said. "It's too much for me. I can't believe it."

  "Belief isn't necessary at this stage — all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics." Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop."

  "My brain is getting a bit overheated," Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.

  "All right — here endeth the first lesson — but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back." Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. "If you come back,"

  "I don't scare easily." You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated "business" phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.

  "Don't kiss me. Carry," she said. "I couldn't handle it."

  "Does that mean it's too soon?"

  She eyed him soberly. "I think that's what it means."

  "In that case," he said, deciding that a change of mood would be good strategy, "shall we repair to wherever people repair at a time like this?"

  Silvia nodded, looking grateful, and they walked back through the studio to the main part of the house, where she parted from him to attend other guests. Dallen's feeling of elation lasted perhaps five seconds after she was lost to view, and then — as he had known it would — there came a reaction. The predominant emotion was guilt, his constant companion in recent weeks, but now a caustic new element had been added, one he had trouble identifying. Was it in the acknowledgement of what Silvia London could do to him, his belated discovery of the difference between affection, which he had always assumed to be love, and another kind of emotion altogether — wayward and unsettling — which might really be love?"

  I ought to get out of here, he thought. I ought to get out of here right now and never come back. He turned to walk to the door and almost collided with Peter Ezzati and his wife.

  "You've been getting your indoctrination," Ezzati said gleefully. "I can tell by your face."

  "Peter!" Libby was overtly tactful. "Carry doesn't want intrusions."

  Dallen looked down at her, recalled his earlier lack of manners and forced a smile. "I'm afraid I get a bit irritable when it's past my bedtime — I must need a cocoa infusion or something."

  "I'll get you a proper drink," Ezzati said, moving away. "Scotch and water, wasn't it?"

  Dallen considered calling him back and refusing the drink and leaving immediately, then came the realisation that it was still only around ten in the evening and his chances of sleeping if he went back to his empty house were zero. It could be a good idea to spend some time with neutral and undemanding people, to wind down a little and prove to himself that he was a balanced and mature person with complete control over his emotions.

  "I was reading a bit about probability math the other day," he said, seeking total irrelevancy. "It said that if two people lose each other in a big department store there's no guarantee they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still."

  An expression of polite bafflement appeared on Libby's round face. "How interesting."

  "Yes, but if you think about it that has to be one of the most useless pieces of information ever. I mean…"

  "I've never been to a big department store," Libby said. "It must have been wonderful to visit somewhere like Macy's before they let New York go down. Something else that's been lost…"

  Dallen was unable to produce an original comment. "You win some, you lose some."

  "If that were the case things might be reasonable, but the fact is that we lose, lose, lose. Optima Thule has taken everything and given nothing back."

  In spite of his emotional disquiet, Dallen was able to interest himself in the point of view. "Aren't we taking from Optima Thule? Isn't it doing all the giving?"

  "I'm not talking about patches of grass. What has the human race done in the last two centuries? Nothing! There has been practically no progress in any of the arts. Science is static. Technology is actually slipping back a notch or two every year. Orbitsville is a swamp.

  "This seems to be my lecture night," Dallen said.

  "I'm sorry." Libby gave him a rueful smile and he realised he had been too quick to categorise her earlier. "I'm a romantic, you see, and for me Orbitsville is an ending, not a beginning. I can't help wondering what Garamond and all the others would have found if Orbitsville hadn't been there and they had kept on going."

  "Probably nothing."

  "Probably, but
now we'll never know. There's a galaxy out there, and we turned our backs on it. Sometimes, when I'm reeling paranoiac, I suspect that Orbitsville was built for that very reason."

  "Orbitsville wasn't built by anybody," Dallen said. "Only people who have never been there can think of it as an artefact. When you've actually seen the oceans and the mountains and the…" He broke off as Ezzati appeared at his side and thrust a full glass into his hand with unnecessary vigour.

  "Some of these guys have a bloody nerve," Ezzati muttered, his apple cheeks dark with anger. "I'm doing no more favours, folks — not for anybody."

  Libby was immediately sympathetic. "What happened?"

  "That young weasel Solly Hume, that's what happened! He's getting tanked up in the next room, and when I hinted to him — purely for his own good, mind you — that he was overdoing it a bit he had the gall to say I owed him fifty monits."

  "Peter, you haven't been borrowing," Libby said, looking concerned.

  "Try to talk sense, will you?" Ezzati gulped down some liquor and concentrated his attention on Dallen. "Last week I practically gave that kid Hume an obsolete computer for his stupid bloody society, and tonight he had the nerve to ask for his money back. Said its guts had been denatured or something like that. What does he expect from a gizmo that's been lying in a basement since the year dot?"

  "Perhaps he thought it would have glass tubes," Dallen said, wishing his own problems could be so trivial. "You know — hollow state technology."

  "No, it's only an old Department of Supply monitor he found on Sublevel Three. There used to be a computer centre down there. Apparently this thing was supposed to keep tabs on municipal supplies. It beats me why anybody would want to be bothered with it."

  Dallen felt the coolness return to his system, as if a door was swinging ajar.

  "You've argued yourself into a corner, darling," Libby said scornfully. "If the monitor was so boring and useless in the first place you were lucky to get fifty monits for it."