Orbitsville Departure o-1

by Bob Shaw

  It is necessary for you to know that at the instant of the Primal Event, known to you as the Big Bang four universes are created. The one you inhabit — Region I in the terminology of some of your philosophers — appears to you to be constructed of normal matter and to have a positive time flow, it is counterbalanced by another universe — Region II — which from your viewpoint is composed of antimatter and negative time flow. The Region II universe is moving farther and farther into your past, although its inhabitants naturally regard their matter as normal and their time flow as positive. They can never observe your universe, but they would conceive of it as being composed of antimatter and travelling into their fast.

  In addition, as postulated by some of your cosmogonies, there is Region III — a tachyon universe, which is rushing ahead of your universe in time; and there is Region IV — an anti-tachyon universe, which is fleeing into your past ahead of Region II. In the natural scheme of things, the four universes are not due to confront each other until the curvature of the space-time continuum brings them all together again — at winch point there will be yet another Big Bang and a new cycle will begin again.

  Dallen caught a memory-glimpse of a fantastic glass mosaic with its intricate petals. I confirm that these ideas are not new to me, although I personally cannot cope with the concept of time itself being curved.

  The phrase "time itself" is at the heart of your difficulty, but it is enough for you to accept my statement. We Ultans are inhabitants of Region III, your tachyon universe, and our mobility in time and space gives us an overwhelming advantage in dealing with such concepts.

  But I am more puzzled than before" Dallen responded. You have explained nothing.

  The groundwork has to be extensive. It follows from what I have said that the universes created by each Big Bang have to be closed universes. The attractive force in each universe has to be strong enough to recall its myriad galaxies from the limit of their outward flight, thus reassembling all the matter in the cosmos in preparation for the next Big Bang.

  Were it not so, all the galaxies would continue to disperse. Eventually they would grow cold, and would the, and absolute darkness would descend over a cosmos which consisted of black cinders drifting outwards into infinite blackness. There would be no more cycles of cosmic renewal. Life would have ended for ever. All that is clear to me. Dallen, in his altered state of consciousness, was aware of his infant son gazing with darkly rapt eyes from the interior of his egg-like crib. But, still, nothing has been explained.

  The reason for our intervention in your affairs is this. After an unknown number of cosmic cycles an imbalance has developed. We have learned that Region II is an open universe. It cannot contract. It is destined to expand for ever, and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. We foresee a catastrophic disruption of the cycle of cosmic renewal.

  Dallen strove to concern himself with the fate of an anti-matter universe which had come into being perhaps twenty billion years earlier and had been travelling into the past ever since. How could such an imbalance occur? If the mass of the Region II universe is equal to this one its gravitation must be…

  But gravity is not all, Carry Dallen. There is another and equally vital force which can augment and influence gravity, which can permeate and inform matter.

  Dallen, transcending himself, made the intuitive leap. Mind!

  That is so. The graviton and the mindon have a clear structural affinity, though it is one you are not yet equipped to understand. There is a major difference, however. Gravity is an inherent, universal and unavoidable property of matter — whereas mind arises locally and uncertainly, by chance, when there is sufficient complexity in the organisation of matter, and when other conditions art favourable. It then propagates throughout galactic structures, enhancing the chances of mind arising elsewhere, and at the same time potentiating the action of gravity.

  Most of your philosophers regard mankind as insignificant in the cosmic scheme, hut your race and a million others are the cement which hinds universes together. It is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

  So Kami London was on the right track! There was no time for Dallen to be swamped by awe — the information exchanges continued at remorseless speed. You are telling me that mind did not flourish in the Region II universe.

  That is correct. The conditions were never favourable. Even we Ultans cannot say why, hut the probability of that situation arising naturally is so low that we suspect a malign intervention at an early stage of Region IVs history.

  I protest! The second Ultan stirred in the blackness. I have allowed you uninterrupted access to the human, hut you abuse my forbearance by applying terms like malign to the natural forces which shape Totality.

  I apologise, but the important thing for Carry Dallen to understand at this stage is that we have never regarded the situation as irretrievable. We have taken steps to normalise it.

  But that means… Dallen's mind was a sun going nova. Orbitsville!

  Yes. Orbitsville is an instrument, one which was designed to attract intelligent life forms and to transport them hack through time to the Region II universe. And the moment of Departure is close.

  No! The rapport between Dallen and the Ultan began to weaken, but he was still sufficiently in thrall to the near-invisible alien to react logically rather than emotionally. "It won't work! It can't make any difference — one sphere to an entire universe.

  We have deployed more than one sphere. To be sure of capturing a viable stock we constructed similar instruments in every galaxy in your universe. Each galaxy, depending en its size, has anywhere from eight to forty spheres, all If them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race's discovery of Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.

  A hundred billion galaxies, multiplied by…! Dallen faltered, numbed by immensity, as he tried to calculate the number of Orbitsvilles scattered through the universe.

  The total may be large by human scales of magnitude but the Region II universe has as many galaxies as this one — and all have to be seeded. The Ethic requires it.

  WRONG! The forceful contradiction from the second Ultan disturbed and confused Dallen, further weakening the inhuman persuasive force of the first. He took one step nearer to his normal state of being, and as emotion began to pit itself against intellect his thoughts homed in on Silvia London. She was on Orbitsville. And Orbitsville, now pulsing so rapidly that the eye detected only a frenzied hammering on the retina, was about to depart…

  "Carry Dallen, you can see for yourself the fallacious nature of that interpretation of the Ethic." As the second Ultan forced itself upon Dallen's mind he detected it as an agitated swirling current of blackness. "I, in common with many of my kind, understand that we Ultans have no right to impose our will, our necessarily limited vision, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions I and II in the present cycle heralds drastic change — that is true — but it was change which produced us and all we know. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must evolve.

  Why tell me? The psychic pressure on Dallen was becoming intolerable. Vm only a man, and I have other…

  Chance has placed you in a unique situation, Carry Dallen. My forces are at a disadvantage in this part of this particular galaxy, and consequently I have had to proceed by stealth.

  You have learned that Orbitsville is an instrument. To nullify it I, too, constructed an instrument — one which has only to make contact with the Orbitsville shell to he absorbed into it and denature it and lock it into the Region I continuum for ever. That instrument is the physical form of the being you knew as Gerald Mathieu.

  I chose him because be wanted to terminate his own life, and because in your society be existed in circumstances which would allow him to travel to Orbitsville and approach it unobtrusively. When he killed himself by deliberately crashing his aircraft I recre
ated him — incorporating the physical modifications necessary for my purpose — and directed him to this point.

  Unfortunately, his approach was detected and the preparations for the translation of this sphere into the Region II universe was speeded up. In addition, enormous energies are being directed against the body of Gerald Mathieu, paralysing it, counteracting my energies.

  And now everything depends on you, Carry Dallen.

  You are at the fulcrum, at the balance point of two of the greatest personalised forces in any universe, where neither can dominate you — where your own reason, will and physical strength can decide a cosmic issue.

  Only seconds remain before the sphere is due to depart, but there is time for you to break Gerald Mathieu's bold on the tine and propel hts body into contact with the shell.

  I, on behalf of the Ethic, charge you with that responsibility…

  Dallen sobbed aloud as the two hemispheres of the divided universe clapped together.

  His senses were returning to normal, but he knew that the entire confrontation with the Ultans had .taken place between heartbeats. A confusion of gasps and startled cries from his suit radio suggested that the watchers in the Hawkshead' s airlock had shared the experience to some extent. His three companions in the centre of the extra-dimensional episode knew least of all — Cona floating in her drug-induced torpor; Mikel in his starry-eyed incomprehension; Gerald Mathieu, dead but not dead, frozen to the line which snaked upwards to…

  Dallen's breathing stopped as he saw that the shell material was a plane of green fire, its pulsations now so dose together as to be almost beyond perception. The departure was imminent. There were no more reserves of time. Silvia was standing at the rim of the portal, leaning dangerously over the abyss, but restrained by Rick Renard's arms. Her lips were moving, forming words Dallen needed to hear, and her eyes were locked on his.

  "Silvia," he shouted, surging up the line towards her. Mathieu's rigid body blocked the way, the blind face grinning into his. There had been talk of a great responsibility .'. . of forcing the instrument that was Mathieu across those last few metres of space… but would take time… and there was no more time… the shell material was as bright as the sun… burning steadily…

  No more fairness, Dallen screamed inwardly. This is for ME!

  He unclipped himself from the lifeline, from his wife's inert figure, from his son's crib. He clawed his way around Mathieu's body, frantic with haste, and launched himself upwards toward the rim of the portal. Silvia extended her arms as if to catch him…

  But Orbitsville vanished.

  He had missed Silvia by a second, and now she was separated from him by a gulf of time equal co twice the age of the universe.

  Dallen drew his knees up to his chin, closed his eyes, and went slowly tumbling into the newly created void.

  Chapter 18

  The headquarters of the London Anima Mundi Foundation had been set up a short distance south of Winnipeg for a number of reasons, an important one being administrative convenience. It was close to Metagov Central Clearing, the largest fragment of governmental machinery remaining on Earth, and therefore was at the centre of a pre-existing communications and transport network. A trickle of off world traffic was coming in from the Moon, the various orbital stations and from Terranova, the single small planet which had been discovered before Orbitsville had relegated it to the status of a backwater. The level of traffic was barely enough to keep the facility alive, but that was seen as an important contribution to the Renaissance. The global picture was more encouraging than many futurologists would have predicted, but it would be a long time before there would be any reserve capacity in the technology-based industries. Dallen was satisfied with the location for reasons of his own, not the least being that the climate was often comparable to that of his native Orbitsville. There were days, especially in spring and fall, when the air flowing in across the high grasslands had an evocative steely purity which, taking him unawares, would cause him to tilt his head and search the skies as though he might see in them the pale blue watered silk archways of his childhood. And even in midsummer, when the temperatures were higher than he would have preferred, the air was lively and had a freshness he did not associate with Earth.

  This was a good place to bring up my son^ he thought as he waited for the breakfast coffee to percolate. Good as any place you would find.

  It was a diamond-dear morning — one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer — yet he was acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen. August 25, 2302. Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space. Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books.

  The thought of books drew Dallen from the kitchen and into the pleasant, long-windowed room he used as a study. One wall featured a custom-built rosewood case which held exactly four hundred literary works, many with antique bindings which proclaimed them to be early editions. In the centre of the case, glazed and framed, was the handwritten reading list which had been the basis of the collection, Dallen smiled as he ran his gaze over the display, taking a wholesome and pleasurable pride in having read every volume, from Chaucer right through to the major 23rd Century poets. His brain, conditioned by nine years of schooling in total recall techniques, effortlessly recreated the circumstances in which he had recovered the list…

  For protracted aching minutes after the disappearance of Orbitsville the group of people who had tried to enter Portal 36 had been too stricken to think coherently or act constructively. Dallen remembered continuing his slow-tumbling fell towards the sun, his mind a chaotic battleground for alien concepts and a crushing sense of personal loss, unable to care much about whether he was going to be lost or saved. He had been thousands of metres away from the Hawkshead before the crewman dispatched by Captain Lessen had overtaken him and jetted them both back to safety. The ship's pressure skin, abruptly released from an invisible vise, had resealed itself within its elastic limits and the air losses were no longer a matter of urgency.

  In the days that followed Dallen had been able to lose himself in hard work, because — once the incredible truth about the sphere had been accepted — there remained the practical business of the return to Earth.

  Many starships, ranging in type from bulk carriers to passenger vessels, had been left in a vast circle around the sun when Orbitsville had vanished from the normal continuum. Forming part of the same circle, but in much larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.

  The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships — large and small — had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.

  The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose p
assenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.

  "That's purely for starters," she had said, smiling. "Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going."

  The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.

  He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife — Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more — and he had learned that all grief has to fade.

  "Coffee in five minutes," he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.