Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  “One of those Fairy creatures! Hypnosis. Or psychokinesis. Some mental force you don’t know about—”

  “They help with the crops. They have a beneficial influence. We love them; they may as well be our own children—” He smiled benignly.

  “But they’re sabotaging the colony. They must be.”

  “And yet, the truth is we are their children. . . .” Then—as though the sight of the inky water discharged some kind of static from Greenberg’s brain (murk into murk, as it were) the man became lucid and began to talk coherently at last, approximately on our wavelength; a mental cripple, briefly peering through the bars of his disorder into the real world once again, struggling to communicate his disorder. “It’s their sense of time . . . Odd to us. Real for this world. The appropriate Umwelt. The right perceived environment. The successful evolutionary one. The sun draws light into it, the pebble draws ripples to it: that’s the way we see it, I don’t say that’s how it is. Though we’re learning. Such a strain and a nuisance, having to talk to you like this, explaining. We’ve adapted well, considering. We’re used to living here. It wasn’t unpleasant, once we got right amongst them. It was so disturbing and tor- meriting, before that—until we got here and adjusted. Two or three years, lost out there by the sea. It took another two or three years trekking, to find the right spot—the place of power. But we’re catching on now—”

  “You aren’t adapting, man! You’re dying out.’’ Snatching up the tumbler of inky water angrily, I rushed out of doors and jerked the contents violently into the pond. I heard Greenberg’s laughter behind me, from the doorway. He came out and removed the empty tumbler from my hand, bent down and refilled it with murky water, which he took indoors and set on the table again. A rite, a rite of murk and water. The impossible separation, the reversal of the flow of time. Automatically, I glanced at the roof. There was no sign of any Fairy there now. I felt annoyed at myself for looking; then enraged that creatures so insubstantial, so evanescent, had apparently caused so much harm. They weren’t fairies, they were devils. But how had they done it? Thank God that Cambria, Hekla, Livingstone and Zoe had been such raw, dormant worlds, after all, with no mischievous higher life!

  “Those creatures are obviously responsible,’’ nodded Marinetti. “But what are they? I can hardly see the damned things.’’

  “After a few years, you cotton on,” confided Greenberg. “They’re a superior adaptation, no doubt about it. We’d have broken down but for their guidance . . . Signs, such as the de-inking of water.”

  “In what way superior?”

  “I mean more widespread than us—”

  “Since you haven’t bred yourselves, nor bred your animals, but only shrunk to this pitiful muskox-at-bay circle in the middle of nowhere, that must be the case!”

  “Not widespread in that sense.” Greenberg struggled to express himself. “Not in your sense. I guess it’s hard to remember that you yourselves can’t see how they’ve spread out around you, the way we can now.”

  Greenberg braced himself; from now on he talked in a stiffly lucid way, with a huge, resentful effort, like someone having to speak in a foreign language they despised.

  “They’re not widespread in the sense of numbers. They’re spread out in time, do you see . . . In time. No, you can’t see, that’s the whole trouble. Not till you learn the trick. I guess that’s why they have those faceted eyes, so they can perceive the different present moments . . . different quanta of the present. Listen, Mister Starship Commander with your clever Einsteinian time dilation, I tell you they can perceive duration, the way you perceive extension in space. Imagine yourself always looking at the world through a narrow tube. Things will seem to be appearing and disappearing all the time, while you look around, right? But actually the world stays linked up and constant, because we perceive extension. A frog doesn’t see the world our way, though. It just sees a few patterns and movements. If a thing keeps still, it’s just not there. Bits of the real world just aren’t there at all! We’re better than frogs, because the world’s all here for us all the time. But how much better are we, eh?”

  “You're not saying that we’re like frogs, compared to these Fairies?”

  “Oh, I am! They live in a world, as large again! They perceive duration—extension in time. That’s the world they live in!”

  “Fairyland!”

  “So you only see them a little, every now and then. Yes, we’re like frogs, only seeing the fly when it moves. Not seeing all the world that’s really there. How can we possibly influence or exploit a world we can’t see? It isn’t like our not seeing X-rays or radio waves yet still being able to build sensors to detect them . . . We can’t build sensors to see duration. How to? The concepts don’t exist, for Men—”

  “They certainly seem to exist for you!”

  “Oh, we’re being shown. We’re learning. We’re not really their children. More like their pets. Their experiment. We’re more convenient to them here, than at the coast, you see.”

  “Why didn’t you stay there?”

  “Couldn’t,” mumbled Greenberg angrily. “The . . . pressure of their Umwelt . . . the suction towards the center of the land . . . too much. The whirlpool of their sense of time . . . intruding on us. You’ll understand, if you stay a few years. How is it now? You feel the world enduring moment by moment: one moment after another. The past, fixed, gone forever. The future, just about to happen. In between, there’s the specious present: how long does it last? How much present-time do you feel you inhabit? Something between three and seven minutes, I’d say. That’s about the length of time you feel the ‘present’ lasts, isn’t it?

  Well, how long is their present? It’s hours— days!”

  “You mean they see into the future?”

  “No! Their present is larger, that’s all. They’re only probably-here in our own specious present. Their probability of being here oscillates in time, wherever they direct their attention—the same way as the thing you’re looking at in your field of vision seems more real, while you focus on it, though the rest’s still there. They’re like particles with resonance peaks, Commander. They could be anywhere—any-time! They’re most probable at certain times—though actually they spread over all the possible timespan open to them. And we can feel this. Oh yes, we can feel it. Our reality is dictated by them.”

  “Ridiculous. A being can’t shuttle about in time.”

  “They don’t shuttle. They extend over a longer period than we do. What the hell is time, anyway? It’s only a way of relating events and measuring them. It doesn’t exist on its own.”

  “That doesn’t explain how they could de-ink that water.”

  “Yes, it damn well does. Tracking backwards, from our point of view, they seem to influence events towards previous states . . . They’re only really amplifying an earlier bit of their own specious present, the way we focus more attention on an object when we look at it; only the world isn’t made of objects, Commander, it’s made of processes, events. We’re only observers spread out in space, but they can be unobservers too— unobserving events happening, as they track

  back. Like the ink in the water. They didn’t de-ink it. I inked it, actually, when we saw your little ship coming down. As a demonstration. They unobserved it for your benefit, to show you. I loiew they would. We’re luckier than frogs. At least we can share in their world a little. We see their unobservations. We see the ripples couverging on the pebble thrown in the pond. We see the world fluctuating backwards and forwards. Children weren’t born to us after a while . . . because the moment of conception becomes the separating of the sperm from the egg!”

  “More likely because they had the urge drained out of them,” I whispered to Commander Marinetti.

  “They don’t hate us; they drew us here, to the center, to care for us, Commander! Oh, it started about the second year, I guess. Dreams first. Our dreams running backwards . . . Have you ever dreamt backwards, Commander? It’s much easier for them to i
nfluence a dream . . . Dreaming backwards was just our preparation for the same thing happening in waking life. It was the habituation of our minds to sense what they sense.”

  “The ink thing happened,” Resnick protested. “Look, I saw it happen. It did violate thermodynamics!”

  “No, it was just one way of seeing what happened, inside the span of a present that included the whole event. The world stays conserved for them. They know much more about the workings of our minds now. They’ve studied us.”

  “So they see things differently from us. Or so you say. How did this stop your animals breeding?” demanded Marinetti, taking my point about the possible psychological block in the colonists’ case.

  “Ah,” grinned Greenberg slyly, “there was no way of conceiving the world. So there was no way of conceiving in it, either.”

  “Those are just words, man.”

  Greenberg cackled inanely. “Do you think we have the language for discussing this, Commander? We’re like the frog’s eye and brain, built to notice something utterly limited. Why do you suppose the word ‘conceive’ ties Thought and Life together so neatly?”

  “A frog still lays eggs that hatch successfully, whatever we think of the universe, Mr. Greenberg.”

  “Alas, if only we were frogs then . . . We had some luck with the chickens for a time. Even they were a shade too bright. Capable of being influenced ... Or maybe we didn’t look after them properly, we had other things on our minds by then.”

  That was more likely, I thought! The Fairies had very effectively sabotaged our settlers—by getting them to do it themselves!

  Marinetti looked close to tears; but he was drying them before an inner fire of angry duty.

  “I expect you want to be evacuated, now?”

  “Back to Earth? To insane hospitals? Oh no, this is our world. We live here. We’re learning to know it. Know them. I realize that there won’t be any kids to carry on the work . . .”

  “What work?” sneered Marinetti.

  “The work of learning, of course.”

  “Learning what? To survive here?”

  “No, you idiot, the work of finding out what this world is. That’s all. We live here, don’t you see? We’ve been learning to understand too long to give up now. Anyway, I’m sure they like us. Or the crops wouldn’t thrive—”

  “You’re abject.”

  “A man has one life, then it ends. We have our lives to lead, and finish them. Then the whole event will have taken place. We will have seen it out. Don’t you realize,” Greenberg whispered urgently, “we will have known the whole lifespan of Man on this world, when the last one of us dies? The whole experience will have been acted out by us personally. We will have shown them an event lasting fifty or sixty years and, what’s more, that we are satisfied with this event! This will be our full true span of knowledge—longer, far longer, than theirs! We’ll win, in dying.”

  “It’s dreadful,” murmured Marinetti. “We can’t take them back to Earth. They’re aliens now. How can we leave them here, though, like this?” “You can leave us,” shouted Greenberg, overhearing, “because we damn well are aliens. What did you expect, dumping us here? That you’d find a world peopled with human beings? Now, Mister Commander, Sir, I have other things to think about. More important things. You caused a lot of upset, landing here again. You had no right to.” And off he stalked. And the other colonists too, leaving us alone to find our own way back to the survey craft.

  “We can’t evacuate them. Definitely,” Marinetti told us as we walked out through the contemptible mini-suburb. “We can’t take this absurd defeat back to Earth from the stars.”

  “On the other hand,” said Laura Philipson, “if any of it’s true, aren’t the aliens here terribly important? What are they? How are they? What do they mean? They could change our whole concept structure. I feel . . . this may be the major discovery of the whole journey. And the colonists are our only tool for knowing. Oughtn’t we try to take them back for that reason, whatever they wish? This mightn’t seem such a failure, then. This might seem one of the great breakthroughs in our knowledge.”

  I myself nodded, half convinced. Because, frustrating, depressing, and damping of all our hopes for a viable colony though this was, at least (and at last) something out of the ordinary had happened. Almost, I thought bizarrely, worth losing one world—to gain a whole unexpected dimension.

  “We’ve no way to force them, even if we wanted to,” Resnick retorted. “Besides, I think it’s downright dangerous to stay here a moment longer than we have to. We all saw that blob of ink return to its starting point, from inky water. We saw it. Us. The new arrivals. We can be influenced in a way we never were during all those months building the colony originally. We’ve left our human ‘specimens’ here. The Fairies have found out about us. If Greenberg’s telling the truth, they’ve i put us through a rats’ maze, with walls made of time instead of space. It needs a separate special scientific expedition, taking precautions we can’t take.”

  “The last colonist will be dead by the time that could get here,” argued Laura. “Forty years’ experience wasted . . . what to do then? Plant another colony of people and let them be affected like laboratory animals? Hardly!”

  Marinetti looked frustrated, dried up; dehydrated of his hopes. But he refused to stay. “The main thing is to take the facts back to Earth, not the casualties,” he told us flatly, drably.

  “It isn’t so bad,” I reassured. “There’s the whole future. There’ll be star travel, communication. This is only the first starship. The problem of Haven can wait another hundred years, or a thousand years—if it has to. We’ll be back. Some human beings will, that is. They’ll know what to expect.”

  So Laura flew our little ship back, up to Starseeder and we made ready to light the fusion torch.

  Fairies—or a fairy—on board Starseeder. Can’t catch them, can’t even film them to prove it. Now you see them, now you don’t. Even this isn’t true, since they aren’t completely present, riding their wave of probability back and forth, dodging us, keeping their amplitude peaks out of phase with our brief specious present. All the time they’re living slightly in the past or future. They just ghost via us briefly, momentarily, yet not present enough to catch. Maybe there’s only one that slipped on board the survey craft. How to tell?

  One is enough. Astrophysics reports ridiculous observations: quasars blue-shifting towards us, as though the universe is contracting in on itself with us at the center of focus. It can’t be the case, or the whole sky would be blazing with inpouring radiation. And yet . . . perhaps it is . . . for microseconds? Some sensors overload and burn out. Still, the quasar and far galaxy observations aren’t constant—they fluctuate. We have to joke that a fairy is in the equipment, and disregard them.

  One of the technicians puts a bowl of milk and a saucer of food scraps outside his cabin door. He says he was figuring on a new improved fairy-trap. No sign of the trap, though, only the bowl and the saucer. Marinetti reprimands him for stupidity. But in a kindly way.

  Swanson, Navigator-Astronomer, is blinded in one eye by a flaring up of light when he looks through the optical scope for a star-fix. His skin is deeply sunburnt around the eye. The retina is destroyed, burnt out. By all the light in the universe, pouring inwards.

  It cannot be that way.

  We’ve set our course, now, not by star-fix, but by computer course memory and radio-maps. Too risky to look outside directly. Automating the op- ticals only results in equipment overloading, even before dampers intervene. If we didn’t know that the outside termperature of space is still steady a shade above absolute zero, we might be forgiven for assuming that the universe was in- j deed imploding in a storm of light and radiation, from time to time, at random. As it is, we have to accept that somehow we perceive the expansion of the universe in reverse, for brief moments. Do our instruments really perceive this too? Or do we only perceive them as doing it—while that Fairy is “unobserving” us? How was Swan
son’s eye burnt? Do we only hallucinate that it is burnt?

  Critical surges in the fusion drive, as it accelerates us to translight transition. Impossible to hold the magnetic plasma steady when currents are liable to alternate and fluctuate like this at random. We switch the drive off, having only achieved one thousandth of light-speed, nowhere near to transition point. Now we’re drifting, hopefully in the direction of Sol; though Sol will have moved out of our path by the time we arrive there, approximately 8,000 years from now at our present velocity. So we blend arsenic compounds in the lab and put out other saucers and dishes of food and milk, doped with the poison. They are accepted. Joy! The dishes are licked clean. Thank God for that.

  There’s a pool of arsenic-laced milk and a heap of arsenic-laced food, undigested, on the floor in the same position where the bowl and saucer were yesterday. The bait has been uneaten; undrunken. Can I say that, since it was originally drunk and eaten? It had been de-eaten, de-drunk; earlier in the same moment of fairy time as it was consumed in, later on in our own time.

  On we drift, 8,000 years away from Earth. Now, that really is a time-span to conjure with! I’m thinking a lot about the time-spans now. Last night, for the first time, I dreamed a dream backwards.

  Backwards dream a dreamed I.

  ON COOKING THE FIRST HERO IN SPRING

  When we finally landed, through miles of hazy cloud, the Clayfolk (as we decided to call them) seemed oblivious of the silver ship settling in their midst and went about their business, plastering walls, molding pots, and gathering food. They looked like upright, bifurcate slugs, with bodies that stretched and contracted as they walked, producing a curious undulating pogostick effect. They could pop out any number of pseudopod fingers at will from the ends of their arms, like clusters of snails’ horns, then resorb them back into the wrist stumps. Proof of their culture lay all around us: the huts, the pottery, the cooking fires. Yet their blank indifference bothered us. Was this really intelligent behavior?