by John Brunner
And an empty beach, newly created by a rise in the level of the sea, which until a generation ago had been twice her height above the water, overlooked by a cave whose entrance was framed by concrete pillars once as formal as a propylaeum, now tilted and off-square as though they had been earthquake-struck—
The darkness was full of a roaring noise. For a second she thought of it as the grinding of just such an earthquake, only infinitely worse: the sound of spacetime being shattered and remade—a memory. Then, through her still-closed lids, she realized there was no more darkness. Boat had diverted what remained of her power into turning on her searchlights, making night into day, and the racket was the chattering of a helicopter coming in to land.
Abruptly she realized who and where she was, and whose the presence at her back had been during her dream. Also she registered that her pain was arriving in rhythmical waves and there was wetness between her legs. Opening her eyes in terror, she found that the cave had been invaded by men and women peeling off coveralls to reveal green sterile clothing. Alongside them marched machines on legs, better than wheels for such rough going. Some of them, fitted with their own lights, carried TV cameras. Humming softly, they settled around her like vultures beside a corpse-to-be, and the people closed on her like ghouls.
Oh, this was wrong! Here, now, should be a time of solitude, when the magic and mysterious process of making a new life reached its fulfillment! What business did strangers have to intervene? Or anybody? (She had almost loved someone; she must learn to love her child—children…)
She begged for mercy and surcease; they gave her none.
They had dealt with Gene first, in case he interfered with what they planned. Awakened by the row, he had started to his feet and rushed to the cave entrance. A silent machine like a chrome-plated stick figure awaited him. It was impeccably programmed. The back of his head sank into a resilient pad and a band closed around his neck; his arms, his torso, his legs were matched from behind by clasping metal limbs with joints in precisely the right places to let him move provided he did so very slowly. At the least hint of an attempt to break loose, they locked solid.
Also there was the sting of a diadermic on the inside of his left elbow, on feeling which he screamed.
Because at that instant dreadful memories stormed in.
He was cocooned into rigidity and weightless (she also). His face was covered by a mask (like hers). Food and water belonged to his past and maybe future (and hers). Taped to the crook of his elbow (and hers) there was a pipe warranted to deliver sufficient nourishment into his veins (and hers). It was to keep him (her too) alive for an hour before, a week after—and who could say how long between?
Would there be time?
There was nothing to do except report his subjective perceptions. Everything else was taken care of by computers. He was very frightened, and said so once or twice—but they would know that already, because they were monitoring his bodily condition. Minutes ticked away. He could see a clock, but no other instruments—what use would they have been? At least the designers had been thoughtful enough to site a window where he could look out of it, and a couple of times he began to count the stars it made visible. But the stabilization was imperfect, and new ones drifted into view while others vanished, so he kept on losing track.
Around him amazing energies assembled. Eventually his nerves started to sing, as though the fabric of the space he occupied were being warped.
Well, that was true.
He began to feel a sort of separation from himself, his thoughts becoming dreamlike and random. The sensation was not unpleasant, though the frustration he experienced when he tried to describe it was. In fact it became worse than just unpleasant. It became infuriating. He wanted more than anything to flee back into his own past and cancel the decision which had led him to this utter loneliness on a path that others had dared, only to return insane or dead.
As the clock closed on its zero, he found his voice one final time.
“I must be out of my mind!” he cried.
And was, for the universe shattered.
Tore apart.
Dissolved.
Ceased.
There were not, never had been, could never be, words to describe the experience.
Except perhaps it felt a bit like being a billion people at once… and all of them dead.
Yet he was here: in his body (he sensed the pounding of his heart); breathing without a mask; able to see and hear and feel and doubtless speak, once he could summon up the energy to do so, which had been filched from him by the injection in his elbow. Right now talking didn’t seem all that important.
Curious, he gazed around as though he had never seen this place before—and in a sense he hadn’t, for not even at midsummer noonday had there been such brilliant light in here. Over the months he and Stacy had brought ashore many of the facilities from Boat, but some were too heavy, some called for power they could not provide, and some she was forbidden to part with by her original programming, so the home they had created was by no means luxurious. Indeed, it now disgusted him, for there was a heap of rubbish by the entrance as foul as a medieval midden (did I pass that every day and disregard it?), and the bed they had shared was—
Best that he could not see it past the clustering people and machines. But it was all being recorded, of course: every last minutest detail…
“We couldn’t let you go on with your playacting any longer,” said a stern voice nearby. Gene turned his head as quickly as the machine that held him in its clutch permitted, and saw that the speaker was a woman with short brown hair, thin enough to be mistaken for a boy, though with betraying lines of age once one looked closely at the skin below her jaw. She went on, “Her waters have broken. She must have been in an incredibly deep sleep, practically a coma. Otherwise the first stage of labor would have roused her, and that must have set in two hours ago… Oh, stop looking at me like a stranger! I’m Dr. Catherine Hoy—as you’re perfectly aware!”
Hoy—boy…
“No, you’re not,” Gene said wearily. “You’re Bony, the cabin boy, and you helped to row a boat ashore from that Venetian galley. Where’s the captain?”
He tried to turn his head further, but the movement was too hasty for the suspicious machine, and it locked up. Dispirited, he let himself slump against it, whereupon—with due and automatic caution—it relented.
By that time, something more important had claimed his attention. Closing his eyes briefly, he sought words.
“If you say you’re called Hoy, and you’re a doctor, I guess I have to take your word for it even though I think you’re someone else. Doctor or no doctor, though, what I want to know is what you’re doing to Stacy. And why!”
“You know why!” came the curt response.
“Simply because she’s going to do a perfectly natural thing, and have a baby?”
“Under the most primitive and insanitary conditions!” Hoy flared. “Man, what possessed you to play along so with one another’s fantasies? We held back until the last possible minute, but when the birth pangs started—”
He raised his eyes to meet hers, a motion the machine permitted, and for a long moment she was abashed at the intensity of his reply.
“There have been no fantasies, Dr. Hoy. There have been realities.”
He was beginning to understand what had happened to him (to them). A sense of intersection filled his mind: yesterday as real as tomorrow and neither any different from today. How to make Hoy recognize the truth whose force had suddenly pervaded his very bones? Suppose he were to say outright, “It’s true the universe is solid! So where you sent us must be somewhere else… yet we did come back!” Would that plain statement penetrate her world of preconceptions? No, she would not grasp the implications. Could anybody, without having gone where he had been, without treading the long path back through time? It would be like trying to share a dream.
At the same instant, anyhow, Hoy was distracted. A clear faint vo
ice spoke from midair, inquiring how things were progressing, and she snapped a response to the effect: “As well as can be expected!” There followed a number of technical questions, and a request to couple up some item of equipment via a satellite connection to a main computer on a distant continent. This was attended to.
Gene took advantage of the respite to gather his wits. When Hoy turned back to him, he was able to say, “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble. The local midwives have been taking turns to stand guard near the cave so they could be called on as soon as labor started… Oh, now what’s wrong?”
She was staring at him with mingled pity and dismay.
“I didn’t understand till this very moment how deep your delusions were running,” she whispered. “Gene—oh, Gene! How long ago did those midwives promise to stand by?”
“Why, yesterday!” he answered in bewilderment.
“You poor crazy fool! I’m sorry, but that’s what you are! This island of Oragalia has been depopulated ever since the water level rose. Your ‘yesterday,’ as near as we can guess from eavesdropping on you and Stacy while you talked with your imaginary friends, must have been about three thousand years ago!”
Had there not been a trace of sympathy in the serious faces which confronted him, at that point Gene might have broken down. Instead, fighting to digest the knowledge that was now invading his mind like floodwaters after a downpour too great for any ordinary channel, he folded his fingers into his palms until he felt the pain of his rough neglected nails, and clung to something Stacy had said when they were talking about—whom? It didn’t matter. All that counted was what she had said, about being crazy: “My guess is that it must feel normal.”
And he had known and accepted from the beginning that one of the countless risks he was running was insanity.
After a long dead pause punctuated only by mutterings from those attending Stacy, Gene said with such calmness as cost him all his self-control, “We searched Boat from stem to stern. We threw away all the monitors and microphones because we were so desperate for privacy. But you cheated us. You had our home bugged all the time.”
“I think normality is creeping back,” said Hoy with satisfaction, then caught herself and adopted a gentler tone. “Yes, Gene. We were prepared to respect your wish to be alone. We all agreed—me and Professor Shaw, Professor Yiu and Dr. Ngota, everyone—that we’d kept you far too long in a laboratory situation, and it was time we had a chance to observe your reactions in a setting nearer to everyday life. It was your coldness, you see, the remoteness that you both exhibited. Neither of you could be called insane in any clinical sense. You behaved normally enough; you slept, you got up on time, you bathed and dressed yourselves and turned up for meals and underwent our tests and answered our endless questions, yet gradually we became aware that your attention was elsewhere, and so was hers. You were acting like programmed robots, not like human beings anymore. Something was wrong, and so we let you go, daring to hope you’d make a full recovery.
“Instead, you became more and more lost in a maze of dreams. And then, when Stacy became pregnant… Well, without us what would your today have been?”
“Real.”
“What!” She blinked at him.
“Real!” Gene repeated. “To me, now, all of this is artificial—hideously so! I want to be beside her, hold her hand, watch while the baby comes, do what a father must and should to help her… You won’t permit that, though. Will you?”
“She has the best possible care,” Hoy countered stiffly. She gestured in the direction of the bed. “Right over there you can see the finest obstetrician we could find, the best anaesthesiologist, a team of top experts flown here at short notice just to help her! And you, of course,” she appended hastily.
“I think you’re here to kill her,” Gene said with terrible directness.
“And I think”—in a soothing tone—“you’re overwrought. It would be best if you had a chance to relax.”
She reached out with her fingertips and rapped a code on the machine that held him. There was another prick, this time inside his other elbow.
The world vanished instantly—and not just the world, but all the worlds. More worlds than there were any means to count.
They had usurped control of Stacy’s body, too, disposing her in what official wisdom decreed to be a proper posture. In the no-longer darkness of the cave, she was being kept as still as the convulsions passing through her would permit. She had been intending to let nature take its course. Nature was not to be allowed to. As helpless as when she had been hurled into impossibility, her physical self remained passive while her mind sought ways of—escape? No, continuance. The ancient realities held: birth, nourishment, learning, making, breeding, teaching, dying…
Suddenly frightened, she groped with closed eyes for a familiar hand, whispering, “Gene? Gene!”
But what she touched was smooth plastic overlying something solid, which vibrated but did not respond. No one seemed to notice that she’d stirred.
A snowflake dissolving in the ocean…
“Gene…” she murmured in a failing voice, and knew that her lost mind now had no haven to return to.
PART ELEVEN
THE EXHIBIT
can walk and talk, can suffer and dream.
It keeps asking how and to what purpose
THE MONTH
is December
THE NAME
is (in both senses) Gene
“I can’t find a way back!”
He was moaning. He could not hear the words, but he recognized them from the shape his tongue and lips imposed on air, and he knew what he meant whether or not anybody else did.
“Gene!”
Not his voice. A firm, commanding one, which he ought to recognize—only something far more important occupied his mind. He said, “There’s no way—but there must be!”
“Gene, don’t pretend you’re talking in your sleep! We know you’re awake!”
Oh yes, indeed, he was. His brain was crackling with insight like a thunderhead sparking lightning from peak to peak—against a gray-black ground of misery.
“Gene!”
So why would this intrusive bastard not listen to what he was saying? In sudden rage he reared up and shouted.
“THE UNIVERSE IS SOLID, DAMN YOU—SOLID!”
But as a shout, it was feeble, and his rearing up was frustrated by the fact that he lay on a couch of such resilience, his elbows sank into it, deep, deep.
He had, though, forgotten until now that his eyes were shut.
Opening them, he saw bright scudding grayish clouds. It was high noon—insofar as noon could be high on this, the shortest day of the year. He was no longer in the cave. He was on the afterdeck of a smart modern ship, much larger than Boat and far better equipped, a prime example of the generation of seagoing vessels called into being by the loss of so much land after the thawing of the ice caps. And he was afraid of what might be in store for him.
Did they plan to peel his mind apart like an onion, layer by layer, with a skill born of centuries of practice? It had happened to him before—how long ago? It could at most have been one year, yet it felt far further in the past than the three thousand Hoy had mentioned.
But if they tried that again, all the knowledge he had garnered on his trip beyond the limits of infinity might well be lost forever. He would no longer preserve the difference between himself and them. He had to stop it happening, and he had no faintest notion how to do so.
This bitter conclusion made him take proper stock of his surroundings. It was not an open deck he lay on. He, and those near him, were enclosed by a perfectly transparent bubble: invisible, yet nonetheless a cage. He reached out a hand, and there it was, as though the air had solidified. One side of the bubble was formed by the white flank of the ship’s bridge, and the sole door set in that was like the entry to an armor-plated bunker. He wasted no time on looking for cameras and microphones and the hidden sensors that would trap an
d analyze his very skin secretions. He took it for granted they were there. Once more he was not a human being, but a specimen. All he could do was cling with might and main to his own self…
But who was he? What was he, who remembered being the jock who ran away with an heiress—the shipwrecked fisherman who claimed the hand of an island’s most marriageable virgin—the slave who swam through stormy seas to liberty and love? Who was the man who had traversed impossibility and come home whole?
He didn’t know.
But perhaps (suspicion grew at the edge of consciousness) he knew who was the mistress that had claimed him.
A shiver crawled down his spine, although he was not cold. There was something awe-inspiring in that thought.
“Gene, look at me, will you?” the same voice said.
Remembering that for a while he had not even been able to turn his head, and relishing this petty degree of freedom, he complied, and focused on the man who was leaning over him. The face wasn’t right—No, more exactly, the garb wasn’t. He wore a peaked cap and a white jersey, and he should have sported a brown velvet slouch hat and a stained doublet… The captain of the Venetian galley! Of course! And Hoy equaled boy, and where was Scarface?
This sensation was abominably unpleasant, as though he were a set of badly meshing gears.
“I read recognition in your eyes,” the man said softly. Gene summoned concentration and made shift to answer.
“Yes, you’re the captain,” he answered in a dull tone. “I didn’t register your name when you visited us. Why didn’t you come straight out and tell us who you were?”
“When was that?” the man countered, glancing sidelong. Hoy appeared next to him. Still no sign of Scarface…
“Why, when you brought us all that strange food…” But the memory grew dream-elusive as he spoke. “Anyway, this is the wrong ship. You had oarsmen, and your sail was furled for lack of wind. And you talked incredible nonsense!”
