by John Grant
I took a hand of his in both of mine. He flinched briefly, as if he misinterpreted my gesture, then relaxed again. "By the side of some of the other things going on these days," I said in a very low voice, watching my breath disturb the small hairs on his arm and then looking up into his eyes, "that's nothing."
He shrugged, withdrawing the hand, seeming to shiver. "Yeah. Doesn't make it any easier to live with, though." Then he brightened. "But it hasn't happened too often, now we understand better what's going on. We can block out the stuff that drives people crazy, or at least damp it down."
"Which is?" I still held his eyes with my gaze. They were brown and soft, and had very beautiful depths. Under other circumstances ...
He moved away from the lamprey a couple of paces to stand with his back to me. "Some of the other common strands we've been able to boost out of the noise obscurity have been very valuable – valuable enough to more than pay for this installation. There have been a few minor advances in science and technology – not just in psychology – thanks to work done at the Center for Neuronic Research. There have been certain knotty little problems our dreaming psyches have worked out that had proved intractable to our rational consciousness. I can't talk too much about this stuff. Most of it's classified. That probably wouldn't cause any problems, you being the DDO and all, but there might be something even you aren't supposed to hear."
I tried not to look as surprised as I felt. If there were things Tim wasn't sure I should know about, that meant he hadn't told them to Alex either, even though Alex was basically this place's sponsor. I wondered if Alex knew.
Tim was still talking. "Let's just say that a few of our spysats are a bit more effective than otherwise they'd have been, things like that." He blew out a long gust of breath. "But none of this is the really important material."
And now it seemed as if every cell in my body was devoting its attention to him. "Yeah?"
"It turns out we've been making a couple of really fundamental mistakes when we've been reading the universe. Oh, sure, we've been linking up all those complexes of logical strings just about right, and the story we've made out of them has been consistent – no Austen/Verne clashes – but it just happens, more by lousy luck than anything else, to have been the wrong story."
He laughed, a brief bark that had no humour in it. "In a century or a few centuries, the physicists would have found out about it, doing things the long, rational, laborious way. What we got out of our dream assemblages short-circuited the whole process a bit, though. No wonder. Dreamers have an uninterrupted feed from the first-hand source of the information. They're not pussy-footing around trying to describe all the phenomena associated with it without realizing it's actually there. They've been spoken to by it direct."
"Tim, I don't have the first idea what you're talking about. You folks discovered God, or something?"
"In a way – a rather misleading way – you could say that."
"Huh?"
There was a silence between us as profound as one of those you sometimes get at a noisy party, when for no apparent reason everyone suddenly dries up all at the same time. Usually, at the party, the silence is put there for the local ditz-head to pop some monumental indiscretion into it, so that the whole room discovers Alice is sleeping with Jennifer's husband, or even with Jennifer. Here we didn't have a ditz-head to perform that useful function, so the silence just extended.
It was broken by Tim going abruptly into frenetic motion. He was back beside the lamprey without my really having noticed how he'd got there, and his splayed hand was between my breasts, pushing me back down onto the couch. Now it was my turn to misunderstand what he was doing, or wanted to do.
"But what about Natasha?" I said, knowing even before the words were out of my mouth that there wasn't any need at all to stop him in his tracks.
He paused, eyes narrowing. "What's my wife got to do with this? How'd you even know her name?"
I giggled. Under the circumstances it was the best thing I could have done. He looked down at his hand, planted, fingers wide, on my chest, tautening the material of my dress over my breasts, and his face flushed even darker as he dropped his arm to his side.
"I, uh, ah ..."
"It's OK," I said, swinging my legs up onto the couch. "My fault. I just ..." I tried to make light of it. "Say, if we as a species can be reading the whole of the universe wrong, seems not too bad if I just this once manage to misread ..."
I was making it worse.
"Oh, shit," I said. "I'm sorry, OK?"
"Don't worry," he responded, his attention already having shifted away from me. He was punching keys on the side of the lamprey now. I wondered if he called it the lamprey as well, or if it was only me who'd seen the resemblance. "I'm just reprogramming the activator, telling it to read a different type of file. Imagine you were running Windows on your puter and you wanted to shift from looking at jay-pegs to listening to a wav file. Same sort of thing. I'm calling up a more appropriate software suite."
We all have our own techniques of getting over embarrassing moments. Mine was to try and joke my way out of it. His was to concentrate on telling me minutiae, so that we returned to the schoolteacher-student relationship again.
"You'll find the experience very different this time," he added, "which'll probably come as a great relief to you."
He grinned down at me. His technique had worked better than mine.
I smiled back, probably a little weakly. I'd been bracing myself for a repeat of the last dream-replay episode, only cruelly amplified. Not hard to see how people's minds could have been wrecked, if the early experiments had been like that.
"Now just relax yourself again, Cello. Like before, it'll be easier if you close your eyes."
I shut my eyes, becoming the student in obedience mode. I felt the mouth of the lamprey swimming towards me ...
~
The last time, I'd been plunged straight into an alien territory that was alien partly because made up of a complete confusion of thoughts and images, partly because it belonged in somebody else's mind. Who was it who said that other people's thoughts are the most incomprehensibly strange world of all?
This time, when I surrendered myself into the jaws of Tim Heatherton's device, there was no confusion at all. Everything was completely clear, completely simple, completely stark. Yet it was even more alien. The ideas themselves were too simple, in a way, even to be able to generate words or visual images, both of which are quite complex information-conveyors even when broken down to their basics, but the mind that was having those ideas was, I was instantly aware, not a human one. It was thinking an enormous matrix of thought – a matrix far too big for me able to identify all the patterns that had simultaneously formed in it. I was able to follow only the simple pattern that my human intellect could rationalize into human terms. Yet that didn't matter too much. It was as if I were analysing a fragment broken off a hologram: I wasn't seeing the picture as clearly as I should be able to, but I was seeing the whole picture nonetheless. Or, in terms of what I was experiencing, I wasn't having the thoughts as, well, loud as they should be, and the sharper edges of them had been blurred off, but I was having all of the thoughts.
And what I saw was ...
No, "saw" is the wrong word, because I wasn't seeing anything. The thoughts were abstracts. They didn't relate into examples drawn from the physical, tangible world.
OK, what I understood, then, was this:
The fundamental building block of life in the universe is loneliness. Yes, the universe is swarming with sentient species, but we're alone among them, and ever more shall be. And they're alone among each other. The way that the universe works is that no two sentient species shall ever encounter each other, or ever be made aware that the numberless others exist. The universe wasn't designed to accommodate life, still less to countenance intelligent life. Human scientists have speculated about how the fundamental physical laws of the universe just happen to be tailor-made so that the e
mergence of life is inevitable, and have built onto that somewhat shaky axiom the notion that our universe is only one of an infinitely long sequence of universes, in almost all of which the circumstances for life just don't arise. The opposing idea, that our universe was designed to make us happen, is of course unpalatable except to the atavists who make up the ninety-nine per cent of the human species, the god-believers, the god-lovers, the primitives who are used like cattle by the rest of us.
All very logical so far. All very human.
All very wrong.
The truth of the matter is that the physical laws of the universe preclude life.
But life happened anyway, as a result of later tinkering with the universe by another hand. An irresponsible hand.
(My hand.)
This hand that was – is – too weak to modify the laws of the universe so that they could take our existence into account. Ideally they would be bent a bit so that life could integrate with the rest of the universe, but the hand is powerless to bring that about. Instead the universe's underpinning parameters simply ignore the sentient life that has been grafted onto the construction they support. And, because the physical laws cannot accommodate our existence, there is no structure in place in the universe to allow for interactions between the different species. Interaction being prohibited by the lack of a mechanism to effect it, the laws of the universe keep the species eternally apart in order to prevent a paradox.
It's almost as if the universe were conspiring to keep the members of the swarm of sentient lifeforms isolated from each other, but that isn't the way the "arrow of conspiracy" is pointing at all. It'd require a conspiracy to bring two independently evolved species together, a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws of the universe. And, because all of the species are by definition within the universe, there's no way such a conspiracy can ever be mounted. A consequence of Godel's Theorem is that, if there's no "outside the system" a logical network can draw upon, the logical network cannot affect the system as a whole.
Conversely, if the walls that isolate the different species were nevertheless somehow to be brought tumbling down, then the laws of the universe themselves would have to alter to compensate, which would mean that everything else would instantly lapse into chaos. Dimensions would be jumbled together, the forces that attract and repel components of the universe just right to keep them in the proper relation to each other would break apart, the delicate balance between energy and space and time would be shattered. You get the general picture.
The universe can tolerate its having been infected by life only if its immune system is in a constant state of alert to keep the diverse species separate.
And it does this, in part, by ensuring that we're all, always, in a mess.
We can look around humanity today and see the shambles it is, but nevertheless cheer ourselves by saying this is just a transitional stage – that the whole of human history is a transitional stage leading towards some bright new tomorrow when everything will be better. But that isn't going to happen. Because we can never interact with other species, there's a tight limit to the amount we can develop, and we're always – always have been – fairly close to that limit. To be parochial, the Veep and before him the Prez may have made Hell the common currency of this nation, and thereby of the world; but they're only the latest in a long line of Hell-bringers. Every time the human species has looked as if it might break its current bounds, might not just approach the limit but possibly, just possibly, be able to peer beyond it, there's been a Hell-bringer waiting ready to bring an iron-soled boot stamping down to crush the groping fingers of the venture.
And that's just as true for the ether-breathing purple-tentacled beings of Sirius IX, or the aquatic monocellular intelligences of the perky little seventh planet of Aldebaran B, or whatever the fuck else civilizations the sci-fi writers like to imagine.
For all of the universe's countless species, there will always be that stamping boot. That's how the laws of the universe must have it. There's nothing we can do to change that. Our fantasies of making an overall improvement to the condition of human life, so that somehow "things" will be better tomorrow, are just that: fantasies. We say that life is the only element present in the universe that's capable of reversing entropy, of creating order out of chaos – "making things better" – but that's not really true. What's really the case is that life can, to an extent, stamp its own rules onto a very different rule system, the rule system that keeps the universe functioning. But that extent is very limited; if we try to do it too much, the universe intervenes to stop us.
Because we're not supposed to be here.
We're only here because some meddler came along and saw the perfectly complete universe as a playground.
So it created playthings.
Us.
~
"Jeez!" I said, incapable of doing anything more, everything floating around me as my mind tried simultaneously to bring itself back into reality and cling to what it had been thinking – or, rather, to the thoughts it had been housing.
There was a warmth on my arm – Tim Heatherton's comforting hand – and I used it as a focus to reel myself back into the world, back into the Center for Neuronic Research's lab.
Reality floundered around me for a long while before it stabilized itself. When it did, I found I was looking into those soft eyes of his again. This time I saw sympathy there. A whole cosmos of sympathy.
For many minutes I didn't try to move, to speak.
Then I said, "That's just a fiction, right?"
"No." Any further syllable would have been superfluous. He knew I knew it wasn't any fiction.
"So the god-lovers have been right all along?"
Again he shook his head. "No."
"That wasn't God I was ... being?"
He let go of my arm. "Sit up if you can."
I managed it – woozily, but managed it. "Spill."
"We call that entity 'Q'," he said. "You know, a reference to the unknown anonymous originator of the first three Christian gospels." He gave a chuckle that sounded like it had been produced by the voice that tells you you've got e-mail.
"It doesn't matter what God is called," I burst out. "He's got nine billion names, hasn't he? I'm sure you could find 'Q' on the list somewhere."
This time when he shook his head it was vehement. I was talking shit.
"God's the guy the holies reckon created the universe, created life, created humankind in his image, guides us on our path, answers our prayers ... You know the whole gamut of the myth as well as I do. Q has none of those attributes. You must have understood it for yourself. Q didn't really create anything. Q just encountered a universe that was complete and perfect the way it was, and fucked around with it."
"You call it fucking around, I call it creating life – intelligent life."
"No, Q didn't do that. Hasn't done. Couldn't."
"But that's what I—"
"No, I tell you. That's only what Q thinks he did. He thinks he's got the attributes of God."
"'He'?"
His face creased with an old, oft-repeated exasperation. "It. We've just found it easier to call Q 'he', right? – otherwise we tie ourselves in grammatical knots when we try to talk about him ... it."
I shrugged acquiescence. "OK, 'him'. But that's not the concern. According to Q – and who should know better than Q? – he created life, even though it was only as the sort of scum on the surface of a crystal-clear pond." I tugged the back of one hand between two fingers of the other to make a little peak of flesh, so that Tim could see the reality of a living organism in front of him. "That makes him pretty much the same as God, in my book."
Tim watched as I let the skin subside. My fingernails had left two little pink marks that quickly began to fade.
"Q's good at that," he said quietly. "Consistency."
I snorted.
"You see, Q's in denial about what we really are," he continued, disregarding me, "which means we're necessarily in den
ial about it, too. Which is probably a good thing."
"You're talking in riddles again."
He put a hand on the panel at the side of the lamprey's mouth. "It'd all be so much easier if I—"
I looked at my watch. "Time's passing. Just tell me."
"This is the quicker way of doing it," he said, tapping the device with his fingertips.
My shoulders slumped. "OK, I admit it. I'm not sure I could take another dose of that – not so soon after last time. OK?"
He was immediately apologetic. "I'm sorry. I should have thought of that. You've already taken more of this" – he patted the lamprey again – "in a couple of hours than most people can take in a week. I'll try to explain the rest as best I can. It's just knowing where to start is the problem ..."
"You said we were 'necessarily' in denial about things because Q is," I prompted. "That'd be as good a place as any."
He drew himself upright. "Yeah. OK." I could see him marshalling his thoughts. "I've got to give you the results of at least a dozen renderings here. I'll do my best. Whatever reality we possess—"
I put both hands up as if I were trying to stop an onrushing juggernaut. "Whoa there!"
This time he chose to contradict. "Bear with me, or we're never going to get anywhere," he said. "Just live with the fact that I'll be telling you things in the wrong order – there is no right order, you see."
"Be OK with you if I recorded this, then? So's I can make sense of it later." I groped around on the floor for where I'd dropped my bag. I found it and dug out my hand-held recorder.
